Active Steemians

I've just seen a poll by @erikafit asking if 'there are less active users on Steemit these days?'.

I've answered yes, but at second thought, the answer to this question is... more complicated.

First of all, we need to know what's the term of comparison. The peak of activity right after December 2017 - January 2018? A more recent term?

Then, by activity, do we mean posting, commenting and curating? Or every transaction on the blockchain counts?

Do we take into account seasonality? Some people might become less active as bloggers / curators during summertime when the weather is great and plenty to do outside.

Let's also take a look at this screenshot:

It shows the most recent 5 blocks, and the number of operations in each of them and their type, via steemdb.com.

You can see that in all 5 blocks there is no single post operation, but there are 11 comments. And even more votes.

Of course, some comments might be automated and a significant number of votes are, for sure. Which doesn't clear things up regarding who made those operations. A script or a human?

What is another significant type of operation we find? custom_json with 34 appearances. These are operations performed by various dapps, like games, usually at user action. Does that count as activity? Or only posting and commenting?

Apart from the above, we also find 28 transfer ops, one new account claim, one rewards claim and one power down request.

In total 127 operations in 5 blocks if my mental calculations didn't fail me. And one block is generated every 3 seconds. So the blockchain is pretty busy.

Of course none of this has a statistical relevance. Just a capture of a moment in time from the Steem blockchain, but we are pretty consistent at that level.

If we look at @penguinpablo's daily/weekly reports we also find either an increase or a steady level, both at the number of posts and at the number of transacting accounts. By the way he seemed to had had the same dilemma in the past, because months ago the 'number of transacting accounts' stats used to be called 'number of active accounts'. But the question remained: what constituted an active account? The new stat's name says exactly what it measures.

But how many of those operations are scripted and how many are generated by real people? How do we define activity for an account: only posting / commenting / voting ops? Or json ops are taken into account, for example?

There is more to this. Drugwars originally started by putting every operation on the blockchain, now they are all on the game server and nothing on the chain. Yet most of the players come from this community. Is one playing Drugwars and doing nothing else on-chain still considered an active steemian or not?

Is quality of the content a factor? I mean, a spammer is active, but maybe never produces or shares anything of quality.

And there's another thing. Some of the people we follow may have become inactive. Others may still be very active, we just don't see them, unless we check out more than our personal feed.