At the beginning of every month I prepare a report containing details of new users for the previous month. I have been taking a little break from Steemit but I couldn’t resist looking at this report as we are so close to 1 million users
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,'04/01/2018')
AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'05/01/2018')
Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.
If you missed the full March ‘18’s report you can check it out here:
Overview
March ‘18 Overview
April ’18 Overview
April was the slowest month this year in terms of new user registrations. Jan 18 seen 159K new uses, Feb dropped to 73k and March jumped back up to 126K new user, and now April is down to 62K. That is an decrease of 50% on March.
In April ’17 there were 7,754 new account. April ’18 is therefore up 700 % on the same period last year.
Just over 13.4% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile and almost 7% have added a link to an external reference. Both of these values are up this month.
In March 12.6% of new accounts added details to their about section. 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.
It has also been proven with other analysis, this metric for measuring the quality of the new user relates most to retention levels. It is therefore good to see even a small rise in these values
Posting Activity
The % of new accounts with posts was 32.7% down from 31.8%. I am not surprised with this as there seems to be a slightly smaller % of lessor quality accounts as mentioned above. The % of accounts with 10+ posts is 13.9% which is consistent with last month.
We can see from the pie chart above, 67.32% of new accounts have not yet posted. 7.28% have made one post and 3.9% have made two posts. Looking at March values, April results are rather consistent.
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. Not all accounts that produce numerous comments a day are scam or bots or low quality but these are in minority.
Below are the new accounts from April that have suspicious activity. Tagging @steemcleaners and @cheetah to cross reference.
I must add that I have not checked the integrity of all 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. Some of the names on this list make me cringe such as @followbackbot, @twitter.news @recommendbot. It’s also good to see that some of these accounts have already been flagged. 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 March
The table below shows the new Steemit Users sorted by Vesting Shares.
@jaggerfinkleman has about 272K SP. This SP has been leased to @therising
@patipati has about 80K SP and is it not leased out. The recover account is set to @ds1tle
@printingpress has about 56K SP, most of which has been delegated out
@goodnewworld has about 49K SP and is not currently delegating.
A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in April ’18. If you did join in April ’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-april-2017-then-oh-and-happy-steemit-birthday
Conclusion
April was a slower month in terms of new user registrations. However the report does not stop there and although the number of accounts was high, other stats are not so positive.
The quality of the new users remains low and this is backed up with the lower % actually making any post at all.
Looking at the accounts with suspicious activity. I see an account there I am familiar with @introduce.bot, which is also on the high SP list. This bot is up voting posts in the introduction tag and also leaving a comment and has been back with some SP to do so. The bot has good intentions and really calls back to the same old question, what is spam? I am in favour of helping out newbies and the intentions I like, but is more and more of steemit just bots?? This is something I have struggled with for a long time, less humans more bots. But someone has gone to the bother to set up this bot and fund it so newbies get a little vote. I’m really on the fence with my feelings on this one. I am anti bot but pro good intentions.
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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I love good stats, I appreciate what you do for the users of steem. Its a complex system, and this information is so helpful for a broad array of understandings.
Edit:
Bots are definitely a major issue. Ultimately bots will be shaped with second tier moderation.
Steemit as it is, and relying on solely the "proof of brain" algorithm will never do a good enough job at filtering content in a way people want to see it. There is just too much emphasis on what the whales want you to see / self promotion.
Steem is a content market we should call it for what it is, and in that sense also a plutocracy. Ive been realizing that the culture of steem will always bend its knee towards the most selfish actors because of the way the inflation works. Im seeing steem as being a incentivized way of building communities, but more tools to make it easy to build websites on top of steem and tools for groups of curators to work together.
Once there are more focused efforts to fund high quality and focused content on top of the steem platform, with the least developer overhead, when advanced users can come together and create incentives through a moderated purse of funds and good filtering... Then users will flow in naturally.
Look at reddit. Reddit bloomed through the "sub reddit" a user maintained group, and the promise of "wisdom of the crowd". The widom of reddit is owned by sybil attacks by marketers and governments. On steem its a bit more transparent, but is so lopsided towards those who have money in the system, and people who have money in the system are likely a very specific subset of people (crypto nerds). On top of this, steem's genisis and economic distribution makes it even unfriendly to many in that subset.
So if we are going to attract users from outside, steem needs to embrace competition in browsers and really push it.
I have a small stake in steem, but I do my best to support artists get above the noise level so they can be seen by some larger accounts. However so many of them turn to voting bots to get some visibility... Something is wrong there.
the communities feature should help with this. I cant wait for the community features, I really think it will make a much needed impact
I notice there is no peak day of the week for signups; or perhaps it is a function of when new accounts are actually processed.
Upvoted and has been added to the latest MAP Resteems post.
it seems that the team approving accounts are more active around the weekends. It is a manual process so from the trends it seems like they let them build up and then do a massive batch. Thanks for the resteem
steemit is everything in my life
everything might be going a little far
Interesting seeing the drop in signups I wonder if those are the real users just doing other things or if they are cutting down on abuse with people trying get multiple accounts for free. The ladder would be great as spam and other things seem to be getting out of hand again with how smart they are becoming and avoiding people even noticing.
I’ve been noticed quite a number of bots running around. I’m at least glad to see the ones calling out spam and going after people always using tags like Introduceyourself for everything. I feel the same way I wish I could do more for new people.
I try checking on Introduceyourself tag once in a while but the amount of spam and copy/paste that is in that tag is just disappoint. I even noticed some accounts seem to post the same exact “intro” every couple of weeks or month. Sometimes they change up the langue they use even. I would not be shocked if someone was running a large amount of accounts just trying to farm out those easy votes in that tag. I hope it was not always a dumpster fire where people just exploit it.
spam is a problem and so are bots, but now there does seem to be a rise of 'good' bots too which is rather interesting
Great an very informative statistics, didn't know that you are reporting them on steemit;-)
Nice job Mrs Paulag... :)
things are looking promising, don't take your foot off the peddle. Keep pushing forward
Great post as always paulag. There seem to concentric locations for account creation any thoughts on those? Seemed interesting that the one is around Yellowknife, way up in North in Canada? Not the biggest metropolitan area ... More moose than people ;-)
the locations are based on the inputs on the user accounts, so is only as good as the information people are willing to supply and how accurate that information is
Thank you. It has been reviewed. Hi @paulag, I'm not sure if this has been brought to your attention, but for your next STEEM analysis, could you please use
steemit/steemrepository, notsteemit/condenser.The former is the repository for the blockchain, while the latter for the steemit front-end / website.
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[utopian-moderator]
sorry @eastmael, should I update this one?
Hello @paulag, no need to change the repo. Utopian gives permissions to moderators to edit posts on the contributor's behalf.
thank you
You are still posting strong? Rock on (-:
Good job I will vote when recharged
Dyou see any reason why user do not post good content? or they dont know what good contents is. what is the major aspect of decreasing new account in April @paulag. I saw notification from @steembottrackerr earlier today, it could be a spam
its hard to tell why there is a decrease in new accounts. It may be less people tried to get an account or that less accounts were approved cos they looked suspicious or spamy. Really hard to know without the input from steemit inc
It could be less approved accounts, I saw many robot lately. wish you luck with your new business @paulag.
A lot of nice information in your post @paulag. I prefer that bots only be for non-profit use. Bid bot, vote botes, and attack bots need to all be banned if they make money. Bots such as Cheetah-bot, guard-bot, need to be 100% transparent where any rewards are going, such as paying blah blah to do the follow up, and that payment needs to be transparent also.
On a side note, you should show your witness status on your post.
Hey @paulag
We're already looking forward to your next contribution!
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