Every couple of months, a narrative develops that steemit is in trouble and is going to implode any moment. Or, all that is still happening on the site is a couple of regular authors and a whole lot of bots.
Well here are the facts.
There are two baselines on this graph... users that visit once periodically - BLUE
Returning users that repeatedly come back to the steemit.com site - RED
Bots do not feature in any of these graphs as they do not access via the front-end.
The RED line is reasonably stable since October last year, so for the last 5 months retention has stabilised. Any losses in retention have been compensated by gains in recruitment.
The major take away from this graph is the gap between the BLUE and RED lines... this speaks to conversion...
If a percentage of those users signed up every day we would instantly see growth on the platform. Making the Steemit UX awesome will assist in this regard.
The massive spike in RED co-insides with the dollar vigilante sign-up and the rapid drop-off is partly due to those users leaving... especially since his blog has since gone zombie operated.
Our most volatile user group is the US... Canada by comparison is much more stable and the rest of the planet pretty much follows the less volatile trend.
The short-scale ups and downs are midweek vs week-end variations.
ps. The sharp down spike in October is a day that google lost its data and the end of graph drop off is simply because the current day is not a full days data.