Utopian-io Vote Analysis: May 2019
The Utopian voting stats for the month of May.
The May figures show significant change. Following April's strong graphics showing, May saw a huge rise for bug-hunting. Meanwhile the vote-share for development contributions has fallen again. Is this the new normal after the Utopian SP restructuring?
All the details below.
As usual in this monthly analysis I look at the voting behaviour of Utopian-io across the month and compare to prior months. I aim to:
- Examine the breakdown of votes awarded by category and contribution type;
- Consider numbers of contributors rewarded for each contribution type;
- Review the Utopian vote timing to see whether posts are voted earlier in the seven day payout period; and
- Celebrate another great month for Utopian using some summaries of the top 50 contributors.
1. Allocation of Utopian-io votes by category
These pie charts illustrate how the Utopian-io vote power has been allocated between categories over recent months:
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The overall contribution percentage (including task requests) for April 2019 was 60%, a 2% drop from April. The moderator comments percentage increased to 26%, its highest level since I started this monthly analysis.
The mspwaves trail continues to grow as Utopian builds community through the FOSS hub and idea hub radio shows. Check out users @jedigeiss and @buckydurddle for more information.
For those new to Utopian a brief explanation of the categories of votes:
- Contributions (blue): Utopian-io mainly rewards contributions to open-source projects. Contributions are not just limited to coding (development) but cover a wide range of technical skills including graphics work, translations, tutorials, copywriting, bugs and ideas.
- Moderator comments (purple): Utopian has a team of over 50 expert moderators who review and score every contribution. Utopian rewards the moderators for their work by voting on their review comments.
- Task requests (yellow): Open source project owners can make requests for work to be carried out on their projects. These take the form of task requests. Only a small number of project owners currently use task requests but they can represent some of the most exciting opportunities for the Utopian community.
- Trails: Utopian-io also supports a number of Steem communities, typically those with links to the open-source world or science and technology. Two of these are separated out in the chart: steemstem (green) and mspwaves (red).
- Other comments and posts (grey): These are one-off votes on posts of high value or interest to the open-source community, such as the arrival of a new project into the Utopian VIPO club. There will also be a few votes that have fallen through the filters I use to determine the category separation.
2. Breakdown of Utopian-io votes by contribution type
This second comparison takes the contribution vote and task request amounts above (blue and yellow segments) and separates them between contribution types for the months in question.
There are fifteen contribution types.
Again, the pie charts to summarise across each month:
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There were some very significant changes from April 2019 to May 2019:
- Development, down 5% from 15% to 10%, following a similar 6% fall from March to April.
- Bug-hunting, up 13% from 6% to 19%. A huge change in comparison to prior months!
The recent development changes are so large I decided to look at them in depth. The following two charts show development upvote percentages in May and March. The y-axis shows utopian-io vote percentage accrued over the month for each account. The axes are held consistent for comparability.
May 2019:
March 2019:
The charts indicate that both the number of contributors and the number of contributions has fallen (assuming average contribution scores remain consistent).
For me, the most likely explanation is that the fall in rewards following the restructuring, with 2m of SP delegation removed on 5 April, makes contributions a less attractive proposition to developers.
3. Numbers of contributors rewarded within each contribution type
The following table looks at the number of contributors rewarded by Utopian-io in each contribution type, with a comparison against prior months.
The overall number of individual contributors (not contributions!) supported has held fairly steady from April to May after a fall in the prior month.
The figures for the bug-hunting category are a nice success story. This category shows consistent month-on-month growth in community numbers stretching all the way back to October 2018!
4. Utopian-io vote timing
The chart below looks at the timing of votes made by Utopian-io as measured against the seven day voting period for posts.
The y-axis represents the duration in a post’s life at which it is upvoted by Utopian-io. The x-axis shows time across the month.
Contribution vote timing has reduced down to 1.5 days. Given the time required for review and the broadly once-daily upvote approach, I think that this is as good as it gets.
5. Summaries of the top 50 Utopian contributors
Congratulations to all those who made it on to the top 50 list for May 2019!
Lots of pink on the contributions chart. "Other" is an aggregation of bug-hunting, ideas, and visibility, with the split 85% / 15% / 0% within these top 50 numbers. All hail our new bug-hunting overlords!
May 2019
April 2019
April top 50 for comparison.
March 2019
March top 50 for comparison.
Repository:
This analysis relates to the Utopian open-source project. The relevant repositories are:
- utopian-io/utopian-bot
- utopian-io/utopian.io
Tools and scripts:
I used the block.ops analysis system to produce this study. Block.ops is an open-source analysis tool designed for heavy-duty analyses of the Steem blockchain data.
You can find the repository for block.ops here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops
The analysis used all the Steem blocks from the months analysed. This is approximately 900,000 blocks for each month.
The study can be recreated by:
- Loading the data for the relevant time period into block.ops.
- Using the utopianvotes command from the command line, for example:
$ node blockOps utopianvotes "2018-11-01" "2018-12-01"
As usual, the main difficulty in producing this analysis involved correctly allocating posts to their respective categories and contribution types. This relied entirely on the tags and links included in each post. The order / logic I have used for the allocation is as follows:
- Moderator comments based on having the appropriate links to Utopian guidelines and help.
- Contribution post type based on the tags 'Utopian-io' and the first contribution type that appears. Special consideration taken for idea / ideas and social / visibility.
- Steemstem post based on steemstem vote.
- Task request based on the tags 'Utopian-io' and the first task-contribution type.
- mspwaves post based on msp-waves or mspwaves tag.
- Other posts and comments based on postComment indicator.
Whilst I have made my best effort in this categorisation, I cannot promise to have allocated every post correctly.
Thanks for reading!
Hi @minature-tiger
Thank you once again for this excellent monthly report on @utopian-io and their vote usage.
The newer 'anti-abuse' category is I think one to keep an eye on going forward and is growing nicely, even before potential incentives arrive for downvoting abuse. The bug-hunting category is on the rise, again - hopefully this wont go into overdrive :)
It's a shame to see Development take another hit, but being one of the most time-consuming and skilled contribution types, I do tend to agree with you that 'time v's money' is not working right now for this category.
I think so. As is the case here, I am reviewing within a day on first sighting of the contribution, and it is likely to receive a reward in the next day or so. If the number of contributions rise a lot at some point, I suspect we'll be back (?) at 3 days or so.
Once again, thank you for this piece of work, have a nice week :)
Asher [cm - Analysis]
Your contribution has been evaluated according to Utopian policies and guidelines, as well as a predefined set of questions pertaining to the category.
To view those questions and the relevant answers related to your post, click here.
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[utopian-moderator]
Thanks Asher!
Yes, antiabuse is growing well. It's currently ranking seventh out of the contribution types in the table of distinct contributors per month, which is a good relative measure of the contributing community size. There are 1 or 2 team members also making the top 50 each month.
Bug-hunting just took me by surprise. The vote rewards are quite low, so there must be a really huge number of bugs being reported! I think this also explains the top position in the top 50.
I guess for next month, if HF21 does arrive, it will be interesting to see how Utopian reacts to the reward changes. Potentially there are considerations around:
Thanks for the review!
And I am totally blind, the category is there! Sorry about that - This will teach me to have a coffee before doing anything else in future. I shall edit the above slightly seeing as you have skimmed over my mistake, thanks!
I haven't checked in to see where the bugs are coming from - I wonder if the more frequent updates to steemit.com are causing this rise.
With regards to the potential HF21 changes, I think little will be done prior as far as utopian-io voting and it will be a case of reacting to the new rules of the system.
The community is pretty split on these changes being applied at once, and I read plenty of text who are 'unsure' how free downvotes will be used. I like your idea on removing the timing for curation rewards and think this would give larger accounts more reason to spend time seeking the stuff they want to see raised up the pile - A pile that with the reward curve and a couple of 'free' downvotes could potentially be sorted better as far as trending is concerned.
Cheers!
Thank you for your review, @abh12345! Keep up the good work!
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