I was wondering why I'm not seeing people raving about how many new users are joining Hive while also plastering the same style of graph in their posts. It's probably because the number of new accounts created have dropped significantly since the glory days of summer when people were making accounts just to play Splinterlands. Checking out the latest post from penguinpablo was a bit unsettling to see just how much the new account creation has slowed down. A small little rant about finding stuff on hive, it was a bit annoying not being able to find penguinpablo's account using the usual Hive front ends and having to resort to duck duck go ( only using google if absolutely necessary ), instead the search kept sending me to some ghost accounts with similar names. People that compare Hive to Reddit clearly haven't tried to find something specific on Hive, at least on Reddit you are able to find stuff, even if I don't like the platform. Good luck finding some random post a few years old on Hive, either there is some super obvious method to do it and I'm retarded ( always a possibility ) or it's a freaking challenge in of itself. Ok, little rant over.
I'm happy to see new faces in the comment sections trying to hang out, but these are not the numbers I expected in a bull market, or at least when prices are decent. Yes the numbers of comments have been consistently growing since the summer but I think it's to be expected the trend to go down in the bear market because shitty prices. And we're not talking insane numbers just a few thousands plus comments per day since the summer. The thing is social media lives and dies by the number and activity of their users. Sure it's nice to have games and stuff on the blockchain but they also have a life cycle and it seems like the Splinterlands hype has run it's course when it comes to drawing in new users and we can't expect a game to still be popular in 5 or 10 years time. Sure there are examples of good games still having a decent fanbase for longer than that but those are not the rule. People get bored, and move on I guess.
The age old question of user retention and getting new people onboard remain, Hive is still a hard place to get a foothold even if you're determined to make it, and that's not a commitment many are willing to make nowadays. The good thing is that most of the OGs will still be around no matter what happens so at least I'll have somebody to share my shitposts with :P
Ps: felt a bit like tackling something controversial today, hope it doesn't bite me in the ass :P