I have been monitoring the data from the service that shows user activity and their share in STEEMIT, and I would like to share my observations with you.
The first thing that I was interested in is the user base growth and how active it is. I herd that STEEMIT is growing rapidly and even surpassed early Facebook in that area. Well, here are the real graph for the last month.
As we can see from the graph, the amount of users has grown significantly, but the weekly and hourly activity hasn't actually risen, and even fell a bit.
What could that indicate?
1) It could indicate that measures against bots is bearing fruit, and bot activity
2) Since we do not know the ratio between bots and real people, I suppose that the lack of growth of active users is connected with the fact that after comming to STEEMIT they do not find the reasons to stay.
Let us try to understand why that is happening, and what should we do about that.
The experience of some of my acquaintances is that people usually come to STEEMIT in reaction to the information that this is a social network that offers an opportunity to earn something by actively participating in it. But they quickly become disillusioned, because in reality for about 90% of the users it isn't possible.
I graphed the Lorenz curve for the STEEMIT users. It is usually based on the income of the population, but I based it on the share of the STEEMIT assets. Here is the result.
The complete and total inequality between the STEEMIT users is absolutely obvious, there is no such imbalance even in the most economically backward countries of the world. What does that leads to?
1) The probability to earn something for their content is minuscule for 90% of the users, based on the current reward algorithms. Due to this huge imbalance only few authors that could attract the whale votes can earn something, and thus a huge amount of quality posts sink to the bottom without earning anything. There are a lot of examples of quality content posts earning around ten cents, and posts with some rubbish rise hundreds of dollars.
2) New users can't earn by curating. Current curation reward algorithm doesn't allow low SP users to earn the reward, due to the fact that user weight matters, but the place in the voting queue almost doesn't matter. Lets use me as an example. If I, currently with 200SP, vote right before a whale in a post that pays out between 400-3000 dollars, my reward would be between 0,001 and 0,007 SP.
The problem is that voting after a whale is meaningless, but the popular posters have bots following them that vote between 5 and 30 minutes and dilutes the votes of the small SP users that vote before the whales. The problem is that searching for the quality content that is going to rise is almost impossible, since it involves deducing the decision making processes of the whales, but people would rather make their own decisions.
It would seem that dilution of the whale share would solve this problem by giving more weight to the common users, right?
So, how does this dilution process is happening over time? Here is the monthly data for all user base.
The categories of users that I used are the same as in https://steemd.com/distribution ( FYI: the @steemit account is excluded from the statistics ) but the newbie and user levels were grouped as "plankton". If I were to track newbies separately, the results would be even sadder. It should be noted that the change between user categories is happening, but the status quo persists.
So, how did the shares change? The whales lost 2,91%, the orcas gained 1,46%, dolphin share gained 0,75%, minnow share increased by 0,24% and finally the plankton gained 0,27%. It would appear that things are progressing swimmingly (pardon the pun) with whales losing almost 3%, and the monthly numbers are good. But the share of the biggest segment had the smallest increase, which means that for 90% of the people nothing has changed at all.
Lets check the numbers for the users that were active in the last week.
Things are even more peculiar in this dataset. In the following table I assume the assets of the active users as 100%. That results in whale share shrinking by whooping 5,62%, orca share increased by 3,41%, dolphin share increased by 1,78%, minnow share increased by 0,44%, but the plankton share dropped by 0,02%.
In my opinion we have a problem that needs solving, since the minnows are the main body of the new users of STEEMIT, and if the capital doesn't flow into that segment, then STEEMIT will turn from the social network of the whales into the social network of the whales and a couple hundred of the author that those whales are subscribed to. Of course I am exaggerating, but without more active flow of the assets into minnow and plankton segment STEEMIT will not become a normal social network, where the content is selected by all of the user base, and will remain the social media for the chosen elites.
What should be done to drive the assets towards the plankton?
1) The whales should continue Powering Down. It depreciates the value of STEEM tokens, but allows the whale share to decrease relatively quickly. And allows people to buy the inexpensive STEEM to increase their weight. But this process will never be large scale for the new users, so we need to consider another mechanisms.
2) The curation rewards should be changed. In my opinion right now it is only possible for the whales and bigger orcas to get earn by curation, and it is apparent that even than this process is quite specific: when we have a whole group of authors that are on the lists of some whales, so they consistently rise to the top, and the orcas are also trying to capitalize on that, by upvoting before the arrival of the whales. There is no place there for the small weighted users there.
What needs to be changed in the curation reward algorithm (those are some variants for the discussion):
A) decrease the curation reward of the popular authors. Right now the whales are subscribed to those authors, that upvote their content automatically. There are also a lot of people who are trying to earn by upvoting before the whales, to earn something by curation. The current system is not helping the goal of promoting the new authors with quality content, because everyone is trying to earn by curating the already well known authors.
If the curation reward for curating well known authors would start to decrease, then the curators would have to constantly look for quality content in other places. The existing popular authors would lose nothing, because the users would be thanking them for the quality content, not for the curation rewards.
B) decrease the dependency between the share of the curation reward on the asset weight of the user. Right now the small users are hampered by the 30 minute 'bot limit' and the fact that by 20th minute their share in the upvote would be almost equal to zero. I suggest at least temporarily decrease the dependency of the user weight in the share of curation reward and increase the significance of the position in the upvote sequence. This would allow small users to start earning at least thousandth of SP, which would increase the weight of the plankton in total.
C) My opinion is that that the author reward should be temporarily changed.
As it is known the post reward is distributed approximately like this:
The reward is proportional to the ratio of votes[x]2 / sum(votes[0...n]2), since the whale votes are very large compared to the other users the quadratic dependency only increases the imbalance. Yes, this is a good idea that works when there is a greater equality between the vote power in the system, but right now it prevents the content that was overlooked by the whales, but was noticed by other users from earning something. Thus a temporary abandonment of such dependency in favor of proportional would allow the good authors that the whales aren't subscribed to earn more.
I'd like to hear your opinion in the comments.
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