Why The User And Posting Stats Are Somewhat Misleading
We head it all before . People complaining that the number of accounts posting on Steem had steadily declined. This is compounded by the fact that the number of posts are also down. These numbers are evidenced by the regular posts put together by @penguinpablo.
There is no doubt that many people who were posting here no longer are. Over the past two years, the ecosystem lost some good people. That cannot be denied. However, what was the overall result? Are we looking at a situation that is much worse?
I maintain that the Steem ecosystem is much further along than it was back then. Development has taking place at a rapid pace bringing about a number of useful innovations. That said, many want to focus upon the accounts transacting and the number of posts.
So let us look at that.
I chose a date at random from January 2018 and the latest charts that were put up.
January 31, 2018
January 29, 2020
Obviously, when looking at the number of daily postings, this is horrific. The activity is down over 85%. Obviously, this substantiates that Steem is in a great deal of trouble.
Let us look at the accounts transacting.
January 31, 2018
January 29, 2020
https://steempeak.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-wednesday-january-31-2018
https://steempeak.com/steemit/@penguinpablo/daily-steem-stats-report-wednesday-january-29-2020
Here we see a bit different situation. The number of accounts transacting was cut down by half. Yet if the amount of activity is off by more than 85%, that means it was the active posters who left.
This, of course, is awful. How can anything good come when the most active users on a platform are leaving?
This is where the raw numbers are misleading. Does anyone remember what was taking place in the early stages of 2018? Do we recall some of the accounts that led into these numbers?
Let have a bit of a refresher course.
Do you recall the commenting that was done at that time? There were a lot of comments posted. Certainly we want them back...or do we?
Does anyone remember the comments that went something like this:
Upvoted and followed. Follow me back.
Or these:
Great article. Please check out my latest article at ______
Let us not forget the posts that were just a YouTube video with no text put with it.
The challenge was, at that time, the blockchain was being spammed. There were bots (outside the bid bots) that were simply posting comments all over the place. Each of these posts was taking under .05 STEEM yet it was adding up.
There was another event taking place during that period that many are overlooking.
Does anyone remember the flag wars? There were posts that received thousands of comments, many made by automated accounts going back and forth. Some people were setting up hundreds of accounts to engage with "the other side".
We had a number of articles that would take forever to load simply because they had so many comments. Of course, the ones that were done by humans were not very complimentary either. Hundreds of comments in each post going back and forth calling each other names.
That was what, for the most part, constituted engagement.
Perhaps there is a better way to look at activity: in the context of the entire industry.
According to State of the DApps, here are the top 5 ranked applications.
Steem had two of the top 5 ranking (#1 and #3). More importantly, look at those users numbers. Splinterlands has 5,000 and Steemit.com comes in at just over 2,000. Yet they are ranked at two of the top 3 DApps.
Perhaps the 30,000 transacting accounts is a decent amount after all.
We also have this gem from dapp.com as it appeared in an article on Cointelegraph.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/user-retention-the-holy-grail-for-dapps-moving-beyond-buzzword-status
We all know, at this point, in terms of users and activity, Steem is not in the same class as Ethereum, Tron, and EOS. However, it is the next one on the list when it comes to DApps and their usage. This is a very important point that cannot be stressed enough.
The move toward mass adoption is going to come through the use of applications. I do not think there is much debate about it. However, the question remains was is going to be the killer app that brings the folks in? At this point, it is anyone's guess.
However, what we can conclude from the situation is that Steem is not dropping as rapidly as people believe. There is growth still taking place on many levels. Yes, the raw numbers tell a different story but that can be corrected with a few accounts set up to spam comments all over the place. Does anyone want that again?
Of course, for anyone who feels this place is collapsing like the Titanic, I suggest you abandon ship before it gets too bad. There are plenty of other blockchains to choose from.
Heck, there are even a few out there with "Steemit Killers" on them.
For the rest of us, it takes very little effort to look past the headlines to see what is really going on. The bear market turned a lot of people away and Steem was not immune to that. It happened across the board.
If you found this article informative, please give an upvote and resteem.
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Yes you do. And I noticed you also have diversified into other areas also which is a smart thing.
Posted via Steemleo
nice post.
no, it was "great information".
:)
it was !!
Yep!
I see this very similarly, back then each of my posts got 10 comments asking for "follow me back", "check out this post", "random bot message".
Besides in the comment sections of some popular authors there was no real engagement (The same can be said for any blogging platform out there too though, even on medium many big posts barely receive any engagement).
Then, the following HF purged all of these spammers and low effort comment spam.
Then, following this, we actually did lose a lot of authors, but not because of the platform, but because the price of steem went down significantly and all those people loathing "free $" from the platform didn't see it as "worth it" anymore.
I can't stress this enough but if people only post if they get a lot of money out of each post, then we don't need them here. Most likely they will never repay the platform what was invested in their content.
Millions of people post videos on youtube, threads in reddit, pictures on instagram without getting a cent out of it, a few lucky ones that create enough engagement for the platform end up getting paid but that doesn't apply to everyone.
I often suggested to "hide" the $ price a post gets here. Because else people will think that they "are owed the same amount for a similar quality post" but we know that this is not how this works.
Very good assessment of the situation. I think you nailed it @raycoms. There was a lot of spam and it is good to see the platform go rid of all that.
Thank you for the contrast to Medium and other platforms. You are correct, most dont have a ton of comments.
Posted via Steemleo
Yes, now we see more quality and less people with their "white noise"
Like always, after the hype comes the valley of tears and after this - with a lot of work - the success!
This is a bear market guys - everything will change! In the meantime, you need to prepare for the bull race.
Posted via Steemleo
Lol man .... just posted some stats ln this .... the custom json transaction have doubled in the last perood!
I loooooove seeing "steemit killers" when I first joined the blockchain, it "scared" me, then I slowly realized that if your goal is to "kill" steemit, then steemit must be something worth killing.
Many are yet to appreciate the improvements made during this bear period, downvotes will come in more handy in the bull when people just want to rape the reward pool.
This is actually incorrect. It has been proven time and time again that almost all activity on EOS and TRON is fake.
If you look at traffic numbers by crypto non affiliated analytics, something that is generally not faked in crypto because crypto enthusiasts dont care about it, Steemit alone gets more traffic then all the next 10 web based dapps combined except for Dlive which is in second place behind Steemit.
You have blockchains like Vechain or Ethereum Classic that barely break 50 daily dapp users.
All these numbers presented are faked up to more then 95%.
Its all bullshit basically.
Crypto user base as a whole is extremely small.
My point is that if they could remove Steem from the list of the most used blockchains they would be more then glad to do it but they cannot.
I mean even the biggest game on ETH right now, gods unchained has only 500 daily users, less then Steem Monsters and that game had 15 million USD put into it.
Steem is right up there, if not on top, its in top 3 for sure.
That was a lot to read but informative none the less.
Thanks.
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Hi @taskmaster4450!
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Downvoted for typo in the first line which is still there after 11 hours.
If you even can't be bothered to produce posts meeting a minimal standard of proofreading and quality, then why should Steem pay you for them?
I CAN SEE THE FUTURE
I don't think there is necessarily anything wrong with the user stats.
So what if people complain the usage is down compared to the peak of the bull market? Weak hands be weak hands.
The decline in the use of Steem has stopped. It's all tied to the price of Bitcoin and Bitcoin is in a bull market again. STEEM will follow suit with the rest of the altcoin market. People forget how extraordinarily volatile STEEM is. If you look at the price history on Coinmarketcap, there have been two extremely violent pumps followed by equally violent crashes. I'm talkin' > x100 up followed by x60 down. In dollar terms, the long term trend of STEEM seems to be up. Bitcoin has gone up faster but that can be expected.
I think STEEM will continue to suffer from the bad rap the ninja mining and the vote selling, Dan Larrimer leaving and all that shit gave it. But at some point the fact that Steem's tech is ideally suited for what it was built for will help it regain one of the top spots. I mean, on EOS you need a ton of RAM to get an app even off the ground. On Ethereum every little thing you do as a user costs money. That shit is dead in the water.
The crypto space as a whole is full of scams and cons and self-maximizing scumbags. When Steem was launched, a number of those found their way to it. The nature of Steem is to make everything transparent. Of course such a platform would get a bad rap because so many of the early adopters were scum, not a majority, but a very visible minority.