New Users
I was planning to write an update on how user retention is going on Hive, but I think it's best to examine the major bottleneck Hive is experiencing before we even try to retain our users: having them join and become active in the first place.
All New Accounts
If we look for all new accounts created, this is what we see on a monthly basis above. The number is almost always around 3000 new accounts in a month, with an exception during the bull market of late 2021. If we look at the full lifetime, including the days of Steem, we can see that 3000 new accounts per month is equivalent to the worst days before the fork. In the Steem era, it only reached such lows a couple of times, where for Hive is it the norm outside of late 2021.
Users that become Active
Another way of looking at new users is to ask how many accounts actually became active. The following chart shows those who actually went on to make a transaction at some point after their account was first created.
Below is the same but including the Steem era.
An issue with this way of measuring is that the longer an account has been around, the more time it has to become active. This skews the data a little towards older accounts, although the vast majority of accounts which do become active do so in their first month.
Newly Active Social Media Users
Another approach is to look at only the accounts that become active on the social media side of Hive. Below we see the number of users who make a post within 30 days of their account being created. Note that for this purpose, November still has time to see more users who become active within 30 days.
As we can see, after hitting a near all time low in June, this figure somewhat recovered in late 2023. Also unlike the figure for all users, it is not so dramatically down from the peak. The vast majority of new accounts in 2021 either never became active or were used exclusively for games such as Splinterlands.
However by this measure Hive fares even worse in comparison with the days of Steem.
Conclusion
New user numbers have been chronically low on Hive at least since the fork from Steem. Even with DHF projects to onboard thousands of new users, we are not seeing meaningful results. And yet, as I plan to examine again in a future post, increasing the number of onboarded new users alone likely won't do much to improve the situation, not without also addressing our similarly chronic low retention issue at the same time.