Hive Down, Hispanic Hive Up
If you follow my stats/analysis posts, you will be aware that I often focus on the Hispanic community. That is because, while Hive overall in some ways is looking pretty bleak, the situation looks a lot better when you just focus in on our largest single national group - Latin American Hispanics, in particular Venezuelans. For reasons I have discussed before, Hive only needs to succeed at scale in a single geographic region in order to eventually be massive.
Hive Overall
Below are posts per day across the entire network, since the split from Steem.
And here is daily active authors.
Obviously, when you look at posts per day (a metric I prefer because it is easier to be confident that it is not heavily influenced by bot activity), things don't look great. We're below where we were shortly after the Hive/Steem split, and in terms of 7 day moving average, we're only 23% above the lowest point and 41% below the highest.
Without trying to get into the causes of Hive's inability to grow as a community, we can at least look at the hypothesis that the community size/activity is strongly related to the price of Hive. Here is a scatter plot which shows Hive posts per day along with the price of Hive at that time:
To understand a scatter plot, there are two things to look at. The more tightly bunched up are the dots, the stronger the correlation. There is also a sloped line which shows the overall trend.
The overall correlation between Hive posts per day and the Hive price is 0.76. Anything above 0.7 is generally considered to be a strong correlation.
To conclude this section, here is the chart of posts per day with the price of Hive overlaid, in log scale.
Note that the growth in posts per day tend to follow shortly after price - implying that the high price is what draws users in rather than the price being a reflection or consequence of community activity.
Hispanic Hive
On the other hand, we can take a look at the Hispanic community on Hive by tracking the metric of Hive posts tagged 'spanish'.
As well as daily active authors posting in 'spanish'.
While the overall shape of the charts may not look so different, when you look at these charts with the price of Hive in mind, there are a couple of noteworthy observations. Firstly, Hive posts per day peaked around the same time as the Hive price did, but that is not true for the Hive hispanic community, which peaked in mid 2021, 6 months ahead of the bull market peak. Secondly, we have been having another run up in Hispanic authors and posts per day since the start of 2023, despite the fact that we are still very much in the doldrums of a bear market. Hispanic posts are 64% above their lows and 32% down from their highs.
When we use a scatter plot of posts against price just as before, but only for posts tagged 'spanish', it looks a fair bit different. Remember the most important thing here is how tightly the dots are bunched together.
The same trend does exist - Spanish posts do increase when the price goes up. However it is clear that the correlation is much weaker. Overall the correlation is just under 0.6. This would be considered a 'moderate' correlation.
Let us look again at Spanish posts per day with the Hive price overlaid.
While the peaks in posts do follow the peaks in price, overall the Hispanic community is often growing before the price is doing the same.
Finally I would like to share another metric, which I call the Hive Hispanic Index. I've posted it once before. This is the percentage of all posts within a time period (a day in this case) that are tagged 'spanish'. As you can see, we are quite close to an all time high.
Conclusion
Hive is in a bear market and there is a strong relationship between active authors/posts per day and the Hive price. Overall posts and author counts are down, but there are signs of growth in the Hive Hispanic community. Where overall posts per day are strongly correlated to the Hive price, it is only a moderate correlation for Spanish posts. Where overall user activity follows price increases, the Hispanic community often grows before the price increases.
The Hispanic community on Hive is nearing an all time high as a proportion of Hive overall, and may form a majority quite soon. An optimistic take on this data would be that the transition of Hive to a primarily Hispanic community represents the network finding an overall better market fit, reflecting a less price sensitive community which could have more potential to grow with or without a crypto bull market.
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