Steem statistics for 6 years

Ever since I signed up for Steemit, I've always been interested in how the platform is developing. I love statistics, they can tell a lot. However, I could not get the data I was interested in, which would allow me to look, as if from a height, at what direction we are moving. Couldn't until yesterday. Yesterday, @moecki sent me data that I was interested in, collected over the last 6 years. So, without him, this post would not be possible.

Today I spent several hours processing the information, but not because it was difficult. I wanted to somehow visualize it better. However, after all the attempts, I returned to the usual Microsoft Excel. Due to the large amount of data, my other attempts were not very successful.

So, let's go over some information that I'm sure many of you will find interesting.

Active authors

The question of how many of us there are, active authors, has interested me for a long time. And not only me, I have come across similar questions more than once. However, before giving the diagram, I want to say what is meant here by the term "active author". If the author published a post today, it is active as of this day. If he did not publish a post yesterday, then he was not included in the list of active authors yesterday. In other words, this is the number of authors who published at least one post on a given day.

So now there are about 2000 of us. 2000 different authors publish at least one post every day. That's less than this cool platform deserves and way more than I imagined.

Let's look at the same data, only grouped by month:

And by the years:

I confess, the constant decline in the number of authors from 2021 to 2024 does not please me. However, 2024 still has every chance to surpass 2023.

Post per days

And now let's see how many posts are published every day for 6 years.

For the last time, on Steem, about 3000 posts are published every day.

The same data, grouped by month:

And by years:

Active commentators

Now let's estimate the number of active commentators every day. As with active authors, active commenters are the number of people who have posted at least one comment in a given day. In my opinion, this indicator will show us whether Steem really used to have much more interaction than now.

The same data, grouped by month:

And by years:

New accounts

Let's try to estimate how actively new users join Steem. For this purpose, we will build a diagram that will show how many new accounts have been created every day for the last 6 years.

Recently, approximately 120 accounts are created daily.

The same data, grouped by month:

And by years:

It looks like this year will see the least number of new accounts created, but that doesn't necessarily mean that fewer people have started joining Steem. The rapid spikes in the chart in the past show that sometimes someone created hundreds of accounts automatically in a short period of time.

Activity and price of STEEM

And now let's examine the dependence that everyone guesses about. Do people post more actively when the price of STEEM is higher? To do this, I will place the charts already indicated above near the chart with the price of STEEM for the same time period.

In my opinion, there is an almost direct dependence.

UPD: Following @event-horizon's good point, I took a closer look at the relationship between activity and STEEM price by overlaying two charts:

Interesting results. Now I would not dare to say that there is a direct dependence.

"Daily authors"

Another statement I've seen in the comments is that there haven't been as many "daily writers" in the past, meaning writers who post every day. It has been said that people used to spend more time commenting than writing posts.

I'll try to check this by overlaying a chart with the number of active authors on a chart with the number of posts per day.

In the chart:

• red line - the number of published posts per day
• blue line - the number of active authors per day

Judging by the resulting chart, in the past people did not hesitate to publish several posts per day, while now authors are gradually reducing to writing one post per day.

Conclusions

Of course, the presented data may not fully objectively demonstrate the state of affairs. Some accounts are known to generate many comments automatically, and there are also posts that consist of one word. However, I believe that we can still draw some conclusions.

It is clear that the overall activity on the platform has been decreasing over time and it seems that this has something to do with the price of STEEM. Therefore, it can be assumed that the decisive factor in the blockchain's attractiveness is the price of the token, and not the interface or convenience.

Judging by the number of active commenters, the level of engagement on the platform is still at its lowest point. However, this year the number of active commenters remains at the same level as last year (about 900 per day), so it is unlikely that there will be any further decline.

I also looked at our competitors. It is interesting that the number of new accounts created daily in Steemit and Hive is practically the same. The same applies to the number of posts per day, which surprised me. I could not compare the number of active authors.

Considering everything I wrote above, I got the impression that we are not as bad as we sometimes think. I think the way ahead is only up ⬆. 🙂

UPD #2

@moecki was interesting to consider how the number of comments changed over time. He sent me the necessary data and I worked with it a little. Here's what I got.

First, I overlaid a chart of the number of comments on a chart of the number of active authors.

And then I overlaid the chart of the number of comments on the chart of the number of posts.

It seems people prefer posting over commenting. You can also notice a significant drop in the number of comments in March 2020, after which it was never able to rise to the previous level.