I want to post about a couple problems with Steemit that I think are worrying. Reading this post from December by Hive account@miniature-tiger I started to realize that user retention is a big issue here. I'd noticed that some of my cooler plankton friends had gone silent and I think that's pretty normal here, unfortunately.

Now there are two main reason that I can see:

A big load of new users flooded the system when bitcoin was booming and they became disappointed when the price went down and they weren't growing quickly enough.

People come to Steemit for the SBD with dreams of making it big and unless you are a well-known youtube crypto blogger who can bring a ready-made audience, it ain't gonna happen. So after a month, maximum, people give up and leave.

I don't know the numbers but basically at 10% we have an active user base of approx. 70,000 users, but I'd wager 70% of those at least are new arrivals who will quickly leave.

So that brings me to my second issue which is about content and “proof of brain”. Now Hive account@darkflame has a cool post on proof of brain, but I think he/she has a different take on it than I do. The major topic on Steemit is cryptocurrency and true believers stick around looking for the next innovation. But with all the voting bots and buying votes, getting good return on a post is really about gaming the system and learning how to play the bots. Then when a post has a lot of attention, many other users pile in on it for curation rewards. But the content itself DOESN'T MATTER at all. The vast majority of Steemians are in it for a quick SBD or two, but actual “proof of brain” IMHO is severely lacking.

With such low user retention and readership shifting constantly, how can anyone who is looking to grow their blog based on actual content and interaction in the traditional content model stand a chance of success? So it occurs to me, here I am two months into my Steemit experience and this post is probably pretty typical. User posts 10+ times about various topics, gets a little Steem back and then starts writing shining posts about issues with the system. One month more maximum and they go silent. We shall see what happens to this blog. I hear EOS is developing a social network platform as well, which is troubling considering Dan Larimer started Steemit. Oh well life goes on. This is like my 5th blog, so we shall see …

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