> 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.