February ’18 New Steemit User Report – Blockchain Business Intelligence
At the beginning of every month I prepare a report containing details of new users for the previous month.
Aim of Analysis
The aim of this analysis is:
• Establish how many new users registered
• Establish what % of accounts have posts
• Find out who are the new big players in terms of SP
• See what accounts are acting suspiciously
• Establish if there is a break in any of the trends from previous periods
The Data-source and Query
As always to produce this report I connect to Steemsql (paid subscription services held and managed by @arcange ) with Power BI.
The SQL query used to gather the data for this report was
Select *
FROM Accounts (NOLOCK)
where
( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2018')
AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'02/01/2018')
Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.
If you missed the full January ‘18’s report you can check it out here
https://utopian.io/utopian-io/@paulag/january-2018-new-steemit-user-report-blockchain-business-intelligence
Overview
Jan ‘18 Overview
Feb ‘18 Overview
After a bumper month in January with over 159K new users, February new user registration was down 54% to 73K. However 73K is still a substantial number of new users and is in line with December 17 values
In February ’17 there were 4,636 new account. Feb ’18 is therefore up 1439% on the same period last year.
Just over 17% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile and almost 8% have added a link to an external reference. These values have remained rather consistent each month since starting this analysis. Why are these values of importance? Well I use these to assess potential the quality of the user. If they have come to Steemit to browse then chances are they may not complete these fields. However if they are experienced bloggers or have experience in social media marketing, then they know the importance of competing this information.
Posting Activity
The % of new accounts with posts was 43.77% and the % of accounts with 10+ posts is 20.29%, the exact same as January.
We can see from the pie chart above, 56.22% of new accounts have not yet posted. 9.8% have made one post and 4.86% have made two posts.
Strange Activity
There are very very few extraordinary accounts on Steemit that can push out multiple posts a day of high quality. From discussion with other experienced steemain and whales, account producing large volumes of comments or posts could very well be bots, scammers or plagiarists and the activity is deemed suspicious till otherwise cleared up.
Below are the new accounts from Feb that have suspicious activity. Tagging @steemcleaners and @cheetah to cross reference
I must add that I have not checked the integrity of these accounts or posts, I struggle to get 1 data post done a day and I know from talking with writers, good form content can take a number of hours to write and post. However it is also not unheard of for account to produce multiple good quality posts or comments a day.
New High Value SP Accounts set up in February
The table below shows the new Steemit Users sorted by Vesting Shares.
@promobot has about 297K SP. Both the recovery account and the witness proxy on this account is set to @transisto.
@puzzlingestate has about 36K SP, most of which has been delegated to @minnowbooster.
@pi50000 has about 28K SP, most of which has been delegated to @spydo.
@jayzel has about 21K SP – this time the SP has not been invested into a voting bot and @jayzel has yet to post.
A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in Feb ’18. If you did join in Feb ’18 you might be interested in seeing how those are doing after a year on Steemit. You can read that report here
https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/if-you-joined-steemit-in-february-2017-then
Conclusion
Although there was a dip in the number of new users registered in February compared to January, this is of no concern as the number of new users for Feb was still higher than then average month in 2017.
It is also interesting to see that people see voting bots as a profitable venture to invest in. This is evident by the delegation given by new accounts to voting bots.
I am part of a Blockchain Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BlockchainBI. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit or Blockchain data, please do contact me or any of the #BlockchainBI team and we will do our best to help you...
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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors
I think we can all agree that getting out quality content takes time, no matter what kind of content you're creating. Having known some very prolific writers in my day, I would except that someone could consistently produce up to three or four decent pieces of moderate length and moderate quality. The trade-off comes extremely quickly for most kinds of content.
The worst is probably video content, which you know in particular can eat up an immense amount of editing time per minute if you're going to do it well.
Short comments? Well, those can be put together in mass, but you're not checking for those here. (That might make an interesting data point at some other time; the number of comments that new users are interacting with. I would expect a real human being new user to be reasonably active in comments with other users, much more so than the number of posts they make. Seeing a big difference between the number of posts and the number of comments with the other ratio could definitely be an indicator of automated behavior.)
I'm not extremely surprised that voting bots are seen as a profitable venture, because they are essentially betting pools which take a pretty significant cut out of every operation, and they operate as frequently as possible. Day in, day out, without sleeping, they are able to crunch out curation rewards for themselves.
In a real sense, they are pools of SP which would otherwise be static but which are kept moving on request in exchange for other currency. That's fine if your interest is primarily in getting bigger numbers, which we have already established is one of the primary motivations for posters on this platform, but not so great if you're really interested in getting better content more up votes. The bots, of course, don't care about what content they up vote – they just do what they're paid to do. I can only assume that the people who fund bots (and are in turn funded by bots) share that particular lack of concern for content.
That's not to say that I blame them or that I judge them negatively for that choice, but it does directly contravene what I would like for the platform.
Always best to know what forces work against your intent, I always say.
as always @lextenebris you have left an exceptional comment and feedback.
I think this whole voting bot thing is a big problem for steemit, and its getting so hard to complete for visibility when people are using these bots to promote content that is not, well lets just say...to my liking...
And well when the whales are involved too...what is one meant to do?
Change the definition of the word "visibility."
The voting bots only increase visibility on Trending and Hot. In theory, that provides enough reward for those engaging with them to feel good about their expenditure. If you really want to get more good stuff in front of more good people, you have to get behind Communities – which will do a far better job than bots.
But the truth is that visibility is not why people use the bots. It's the reason that we wish people used the bots. We wish people wanted more visibility for their work so that they could get proper appreciation from the crowds – but really what they want is to play the betting pool game and get more money out of the system, regardless of the content.
It makes us feel better to say that we believe people are using the bots for advertising, but we all know that no one looks at posts based on votes. We just don't. We search for keywords, we follow the work of writers that have made stuff that we like in the past – but we don't look at votes. Because everyone who has been here longer than a day knows that the votes are crocked. The votes don't matter. They can be bought and sold in significant volume.
So the first step to figuring out a solution is to accept why these things happen, and these things happen because it is possible to game the reward pool system by buying and selling access to SP indirectly through voting. And as we've covered before, SP is the only meaningful interaction multiplier on the platform.
Which brings us to your final question:
"What is one meant to do?"
The answer is harsh but simple:
One isn't meant to do anything.
One is meant to work the system as they see fit. If you want to try to make money by creating good content and carefully marshaling your SP in order to reward people for making good content that you like – bravo. You're playing the game like I am. You are playing the game like it's been sold.
But if you want to ride the minigame, if you want to use decentralized SP in order to create leverage opportunities, work really hard at understanding the betting pools and how the timers play out, grab all the augmented curation advantages that you can – well, that is also obviously what the platform was intended to do and that you are meant to do.
The clearly works, for some definition of "works." People keep doing it.
For me, the real question is whether the combination of things which are possible remain viable. That, for the moment, remains an open question.
In the last while i have considered using bots as i am trying different content types that my following are not use to from me.
A good thing about my need to consider this option is the fact my regular followers actually read my post and are obviously not liking my new stuff but still voting for the data stuff.
I am still on the fence about using them, as i am not a bot fan, but i think the shear popularity in use is also forcing the hand of others.
I have worked online for many years and often used paid advertising. But steemit is different and should be treated so. Maybe I would be better paying google for post visibility like i do with non steemit stuff.
Thanks for the food for thought
Here are the basic central truths that we know about bots:
They don't care about content. The people that run them don't care about content. The operation and effective deployment of a bot is orthogonal to issues of content.
Very few people look at or care about the list of people/bots who have voted for a particular article. Implicitly, they care about content more than they care about the activity of the bots.
Bots are a fiscal sink. If they didn't make more for the people that run them than they pay out to the people that gamble in them, no one would run them.
So, we know they don't work for promotion because the only way that they can get content in front of our eyes is through Trending and Hot. Sane people don't look at Trending and Hot; the take away is obvious. We know they don't care about content, because they will upload anything equally as long as you pay them. Having removed the possibility of thinking about it as paying for advertising or as somehow validating your content, we are left with the only purpose for playing the bot game.
You want to make use of some of that pooled SP which would otherwise be motivated toward other content to instead be driven to vote for your content purely and only to increase the amount of funds you get out of the system.
Which I don't think is inherently bad, but it changes the nature of the platform. It's one thing to write what you like and what you're proud of and invite people to come see it and reward you if they like it.
Once you bring bots into it you have changed the nature of the platform from a blogging platform to a vanity press, a publication facility whom you give some money to in exchange for "distributing your book" and maybe getting more money back to you then you spent with the publication house to get the book printed.
At a smaller scale, that's exactly how the bots work.
It's exactly the same ripoff.
Sure, some people have made a fat wad of cash by going through the vanity press. And they are very sure to tell you about every single one of them whenever you wander by, just like the poker dealer at the casino shouting out how much people have won today as you walk by.
Steemit is a very different environment than the online traditional publication architecture. Thinking about bots as advertising does a disservice to advertising, and ad guys are not my favorite people on earth in the first place.
Fascinating analysis, but then I'm pretty much a numbers geek. I'd expect the stout influx of newcomers in January came on the back of the high price of Steem and SBD which certainly made the idea of "blogging for money" really attractive. Anyway, thanks for the analysis.
yea I would agree, the Jan STEEM and SBD prices had a rather big impact on Steemit
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Great analysis!
I suspect Feb new registrations dip is partly attributed to people of Chinese origin concentrate much on Chinese New Year.
oh, this was something I was not aware off! Is Steemit that popular in China that the Chinese new year would have such an impact?
Yes, it is. Off and on the #cn tag goes trending but today is the last day of most celebration though for me there is one more activity on the 26th day of the month. Today is the 15th.
Well i hope you enjoy the celebration and i wish you health and happiness for the new year
Thanks and a great year and good health to you and your love ones.
This is precisely why Proof-of-Stake, or in Steemit's case, Delegated-Proof-of-Stake is fundamentally flawed.
Biggest "pile" of tokens wins.
A pareto distribution with an infinite tail of obscurity.
so true but not funny...
I'd wager a significant fraction of "new" users are just duplicate accounts created to sponge off the reward pool without producing anything useful.
Any system that can be gamed, will be - Steemit included.
Citation - PoS is flawed - Link
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I was already looking forward to last months summary as I was asking myself how and if the grow of new users will continue while having a decrease of SBD value.
And it's just as I expected it to be. Of course this month has three days less in comparison to January and even if you would include the fact that steemit had a lot of unverified registrations which were activated two days ago according to this post we're still far behind the massive growth of January which now doesn't look at all like an exponential growth.