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Question is: how many of those are real and how many are spoof accounts, created through API calls ...
What really matters is the number of active users, the number of posts and comments, the Alexa ranking (latter seems to be slipping, not good)

For as long as the accounts will not be strongly linked to actual persons they won't mean much

Yeah thats true. Anyway people join and then post for afew weeks and then give up -is there stats on inactive accounts?

My following is increasing but i rekon half of them are not active. Comments and interactions are from the same people

Yeah I think that a half of them are fake accounts, but 9000 accounts created yesterday and yesterday 46% Steem jump so i think that maybe this caused this big jump. But i believe that Steemit platform will be growing, because It is solving a lot of problems for content creators.