At first glance this chart looks really bad, users continue to sign up but activity has fallen or remained flat. The activity per user was hit significantly from both sides.

Up until a couple of days ago we had a significant number of fake account signups. We were able to slow, but not eliminate, this signup abuse by adding Google's reCAPTCHA. You can visibly see the reduction in the rate of signup the past several days.

User Account Spam

In addition to accounts being created by abusing our signup offer, many people have been creating and mining accounts. Name squatting due to STEEM DNS has also caused many accounts to be created for this purpose.

Voting and Posting Spam

Over the past month we have been systematically deploying solutions that mitigate spam. We have imposed stronger bandwidth limits, minimal voting thresholds, and reputation systems. The result of this anti-spam measure is a net reduction in votes, posts, and replies.

Conclusion

It is tempting to look at these charts and deceive ourselves into believing there are 80K real accounts or that all the voting, posting, and replying activity in July was real. Believing these things reinforces our own biases and desire to see Steem grow overnight.

The problem is, if we let ourselves believe that lie, then we must also believe that Steem is losing traction / retention. All of a sudden our "harmless" self-deception has us in panic mode as it appears something has come unhinged.

The more realistic way of viewing things is to greatly discount the number of accounts by removing duplicate miners, name squatters, and anyone inactive. This will give us daily active users which is around 1200 and weekly active users which is around 8000. Then filter all of the spam / automated activity from the month to get a better signal of organic use by real people.

After doing these things you will see that Steem is in fact growing, quality is improving, and the sun is shining on all things Steem.