It's interesting that you would use that example, because it supports my position that follows are definitely not useful as an indicator of quality.

This account has no blog posts. It's influence is not related to its interaction with the social network in an observable way. While it does have a number of comments, none of them are particularly revelatory or insightful beyond a base level I expect of all people who interact with others on the social network.

So there's no reason to think that this one should "shine" at all.

And that's a problem, because we as users – no matter what we want to use UA for or what we imagine it might be used for – need to understand the reason that one account may be higher rank in UA than another. As it stands, and as the explanation and descriptions have changed, UA becomes an ever more amorphous single number attached to accounts which, in some way, at great computational expense, provides a number. One which doesn't come with an understanding of why that number is what it is, one that hinges on an interpretation of the platform mechanics which is unintuitive, and one which appears to be fairly readily gameable by engaging in behavior which isn't in the best interest of the way people are using the social network.

I think those issues are a problem.

But first we have to have an understanding of how UA differs from Rep in a real sense, in the context of comparing the two spaces as they stand – and you clearly have all the data necessary to do exactly that at this point, so let's do that.

After that, we can talk about what is going to be necessary for UA to be a meaningful designator, in part by allowing the system to give feedback to a user about why the ranking is exactly what it is.

We know exactly what Rep is all about and what it hinges on. It's about getting voted on. Stuff you make gets votes, your Rep goes up, it's a very simple signifier (even if it has some very obvious flaws as a comparator).

UA is a black box, and the things that you've said about what go into making the black box tick don't really jibe with creating a useful singular ranking of accounts for the purposes of a user looking to discover content, which is the one thing that it should do.

One example where UA shines is in - for example - recognizing @thejohalfiles as being influential.

Ultimately, on the issue of UA, we have to ask what "being influential" means if it's not about actually blogging or not about actually engaging people in comments. What kind of influence are we talking about? Because if it's just "this is an account that throws around a lot of SP," we already have very clear rankings for those.