Content-discovery on steemit.com, from a user perspective, has very little to do with UA. It can be solved with an improved UI.
That's -- optimistic, sort of hand-waving one of the biggest deals in AI and social networking of the decade to a SMoP (Simple Matter of Programming), but we'll let that stand for now. I'm not sure UA really is that isolated from discovery; after all, the idea is to really keep discovery from happening on user-agents who are of likely bot-nature. What they do is immaterial compared to what people see.
What's interesting though, is the possibility that a few friends on steemit are following only eachother, are producing the same type of content which only they like, and also they only like that type of content, so they don't follow or upvote outside of their own group. This is an extremely rare example which I doubt exists in practise.
You might be surprised. Thanks to the fact that neophile adoption tends to radiate out from a few trend setters, while often you have people brought in by already-established folk, when the system is obscure you get folks who find it through more organic non-personal search, jump in, and invite friends. They tend to island for quite a while, comparatively. It's not a problem because they'll just as often use New or Trending or whatever the equivalent is to find new content -- but if the activity in the main body is sufficiently monocultural or low quality, they just don't hook up with any real adoption rate.
In a web-content environment, those users (pages) are called "dangling links", like a new website with 5 pages that link to eachother yet no other domain links to the new website. Luckily on steem it's easier: we know exactly when new accounts are activated via their user_id, so we don't have to discover them via crawling the web like GoogleBot. We can simply add a FollowerBot called "@new" to connect them to the follower graph and only one account with one follower needs to follow FollowerBot.
But is that useful connectivity information? Is that new account a bot or a person? We don't know and, in fact, we can't know until some more activity happens. A static snapshot can't determine the rank of a new agent. It's an open question how much activity it takes to tell them apart.
In case a couple of new users, which were friends prior to beginning on Steem, in the beginning connect to eachother and only to eachother, that's still okay: the wouldn't have any votingPower anyway without UA implemented.
That sounds more like an undesirable failure-mode to me rather than a desirable property. They should have voting power. At least one other person cares a lot! Those are important votes. To them.
OK, let me rephrase it differently: My article isn't a PhD thesis but a blog post I wrote in about an hour and updated afterwards. I'm sure there are many applications to UA that weren't covered iny my article. I meant to say just now, UA in my article was not intended per se for content discovery. I'm sure there are many more applications for it, and among them content discovery.
I might, we have to first implement a test environment and analyze the resulting data. This was just a first post.
Correct, that's why I included D, the damping factor, which holds a beginner amount of UA.
Failure-mode? I was merely referring to the monetary upvote value a new user has currently: $0.00
The rest I'm on board with but ...
This is absolutely true. I also think of it as a failure mode which really puts off newcomers to the platform who aren't bootstrapped by knowing people. It's hard to get in, hard to find traction, and hard to get rolling and stay rolling.
I'd very much like to see what the current connectivity map of all the users on Steemit looks like, though. Even if UA is not, ultimately, particularly a good method of determining whether a user agent is a bot or not (and there may be factors that neither one of us or is aware of that makes that a harder or easier task than expected), as a form of simple understanding of the community as its architected, the value is definitely high.
Your "connectivity map" === my "follower graph". In my example, I began with the example-graph to visually explain. However, in a real-world application (Steem itself), the follower graph is derived from the follower matrix in stead of the other way around.
PS: I've just published a follow-up article! You might like it!
UserAuthority (UA): explanations, applications and implications