As part of the recently announced changes, today we are delivering a lot of enhancements to Utopian.io; even more than we promised.

A New Reputation System

While we were trying to fix how scoring and voting contributions works in Utopian.io, we realised that the default Steem reputation system does not work well for our purpose. That's why we decided to create a custom Utopian.io reputation system.

Made with Utopian in mind

The new reputation system in Utopian.io takes into account a user's number of rejected and accepted contributions, in which categories the user has contributed, in addition to the score each contribution has received. This is the perfect fit for Utopian.io because it allows us to measure how well a user is contributing to the Open Source ecosystem, and then translate that into a simple reputation badge.

Reputation is dynamic

All reputation values are calculated against the user who has the topmost total score, overall on the platform. As the top score changes, the reputation values also change. Such an approach makes the reputation implicitly dynamic, meaning that: to keep your reputation badge at the same level, you must keep contributing valuably.

Reputation badges

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Newbie
Beginner
Advanced
Expert
Pro
Ninja
Guru
Hero
Legend
Elite

Reputation and influence

Each reputation badge comes with a level of influence. The only reputation badge which does not have any influence is Newbie (to prevent new users with the wrong intentions from gaming the system).

The influence affects how a user scores a contribution. The bigger the influence, the more weight and validity the user's scores have when determining the final score of contributions.

Reputation badges assigned by default

Moderators start with the Reputation Badge Guru. This is to ensure that they have enough influence when scoring contributions.
Community Managers get the Reputation Badge Elite by default. This is to ensure that their influence can help maintain the quality of contributions overall on the platform.
Specific members who are highly trusted in Utopian.io can get an Honorary Reputation. @scipio @jedigeiss @littleboy and @transisto all received the Elite reputation badge.

Power to Project Owners

When a project owner scores a contribution received for his own project, independently from the current reputation badge he has, the system will always calculate the influence as a minimum starting from the Guru reputation badge. This is to ensure project owners have enough influence when scoring contributions for their own projects, as much as moderators.

Delegate for more influence

In order to find new ways other than liquid rewards to incentivise delegation, we now allow users to earn a higher reputation by delegating to Utopian, which gives them more influence and ultimately gives them power to decide on the distribution of rewards.

Beginner: delegate at least 100 SP
Advanced: delegate at least 1000 SP
Expert: delegate at least 5000 SP
Pro: delegate at least 10000 SP
Ninja: delegate at least 15000 SP
Guru: delegate at least 20000 SP
Hero: delegate at least 25000 SP
Legend: delegate at least 50000 SP
Elite: delegate at least 100000 SP

Decentralised Scoring System

As recently announced, we strived hard to find a solution to decentralise the scoring of contributions and give the community the power to decide what's good or bad, and how the Utopian.io voting power should be used.

While we wanted to give only Moderators and Project Owners the responsibility of scoring a contribution, we have realised our new reputation system can allow us to go way further than that.

That's the reason why every user can now score a contribution (which was not submitted by himself).

Each user can now answer the questions from the Quality Questionnaire, which before was only possible for Moderators.

Influence calculation

Since every user has a reputation badge and every badge comes with an influence, that influence is used to define which answers from the Quality Questionnaire received the best ratings.

Each answer gives the contribution a certain score, which is then finally used by the Utopian Bot to decide the voting weight.

New Utopian bot

Soon, the Utopian Bot will take into consideration the following criteria, to decide the voting weight:

Score: the score assigned by the most rated answers from the Quality Questionnaire.
Total influence: the summation of the influence held by all users who have scored the contribution.

The Utopian Bot will vote starting with contributions that have the largest total influence, the best score and which were marked as reviewed by a Moderator (or which scored higher than 80).

Since the Utopian Bot can only use a maximum of 20% voting power daily, not every contribution may get a vote, making the Utopian Bot vote never guaranteed and only an incentive for top quality contributions.

The new Utopian Bot should be released as soon as next week.

Projects Whitelist

Soon, Utopian.io may only list projects that have opted-in to our ecosystem.

In order to get your project in Utopian.io and to have our full support, project owners now have a dedicated landing page.

Dedicated Page for Investors

As we want to onboard more project owners on Utopian.io, we also aim to bring more investors into the Steem ecosystem.

That's why there is now a dedicated landing page where investors can get in touch with us to get more information!

Beneficiaries From 25% to 15%

As promised, the amount set aside for beneficiaries from contributions made on Utopian.io has been decreased from 25% to only 15% cross-platform.

Changes to moderation teams

In the last few days, a new moderation setup was implemented and Community Managers have begun working. They took up the responsibilities of Supervisors along with other duties, and were tasked with picking a maximum of 3 moderators each for their respective categories.

During this transition, some moderators were not assigned to any category and have been disabled from moderation as a result. We would like to thank them for their hard work and support, and apologize for any inconveniences caused. We would like to assure them that we will consider re-enabling their roles in the future, as the need arises.

We hope to see all of them discussing and enjoying the community on Discord.

Moderation Functionalities

As part of our effort to improve moderation processes, we have added some enhanced functionalities.

Better moderation controls

Moderation controls look nicer and easier to access, while providing more functionality than ever before.

Reserve a contribution

To avoid instances of moderators working on the same contribution at the same time, moderators can now reserve a contribution for one hour while working on it. No other moderators will be able to reserve the contribution during this time.

Staff picks

Staff Picks are contributions which our Community Managers believe are of outstanding quality. Staff Picks will get higher exposure and higher rewards on Utopian.io.