June and July ’18 New Steemit User Report
At the beginning of every month I was preparing a report containing details of new users for the previous month. In April we broke 1 million registered accounts. However, we have seen a downturn in the users registering, and an increase in bot and spam activity and I didn’t feel a monthly report was providing much value.
For that reason, I have changed to a report every second month, providing details of the two previous months.
If you missed the last report you can read it here
Aim of Analysis
The aim of this analysis is:
• Establish how many new users registered
• Establish what % of accounts have posts
• Find out who are the new big players in terms of SP
• See what accounts are acting suspiciously
• Establish if there is a break in any of the trends from previous periods
Repository
https://github.com/steemit/steem
The Data-source and Query
As always to produce this report I connect to Steemsql (paid subscription services held and managed by @arcange ) with Power BI. The SQL query used to gather the data for this report was
Select *FROM Accounts (NOLOCK)where ( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'06/01/2018')AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'08/01/2018')Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.
Overview
37,694 accounts registered in June and 34,180 in July. This is a 41% reduction on the number of accounts registered in April and May. The charts below show the number of new users registering each month this year. As we can see the trend a has been a negative trend.
In my last report under the conclusion I included the following
However what does concern me is that when looking at some of the new accounts, its obvious they are sudo names, many are scammers and bots. Some of which were set up by Steemit Inc. If I can spot these, why is steemit inc allowing them be set up??
Last month Steemit Inc made this announcement. I have no idea when it was implemented, however it could account for some of the reduced sign ups in June and July.
You can read that full post here
Almost 17% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile, up from 15% in May. Just over 7.3% have added a link to an external reference, this was 6.5% in May.
Why are these values of importance? Well I use these to assess potential the quality of the user. If they have come to Steemit to browse, then chances are they may not complete these fields. However, if they are experienced bloggers or have experience in social media marketing, then they know the importance of competing this information.
It has also been proven with other analysis, this metric for measuring the quality of the new user relates most to retention levels. It is therefore good to see even a small rise in these values
Posting Activity
The % of new accounts with posts was 41.32%, up from 35%. The % of accounts with 10+ posts was 17.61%.
We can see from the pie chart above, 58.68% of new accounts have not yet posted. 10.62% have made one post and 4.36% have made two posts.
These values for May were, 67.32% of new accounts had not yet posted. 7.28% have made one post and 3.9% have made two posts.
Strange Activity
There are very very few extraordinary accounts on Steemit that can push out multiple posts a day of high quality. From discussion with other experienced steemain and whales, account producing large volumes of comments or posts could very well be bots, scammers or plagiarists and the activity is deemed suspicious till otherwise cleared up. Not all accounts that produce numerous comments a day are scam or bots or low quality but these are in minority.
Below are the new accounts from April that have suspicious activity. Tagging @steemcleaners and @cheetah to cross reference.
I must add that I have not checked the integrity of all these accounts or posts, I struggle to get 1 data post done a day and I know from talking with writers, good form content can take a number of hours to write and post.
New High Value SP Accounts
The table below shows the top Steemit Users based on Vesting Shares.
@tradetoken has about 153K SP and has delegated it to @top-exchanges. @top-exchanges seems to be curating posts under very specific tags and topics.
@Drslump has about 112K SP and is delegating to bidbots
A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in June and July ’18.
Conclusion
The number of signups per month was at its lowest level this year in July. Although this drop in registration may be stark, I am confident Steemit.Inc have made changes for the positive.
We have seen a higher % of accounts completing their about section and we have seen a % of accounts with no posts at all. This could indicate a higher quality of user.
These reduced numbers in registration could also have an impact on retention or churn rates, however this is outside the scope of this analysis and will be covered in a separate post.
Thank you @paulag for putting time into this.
I know Steemit Inc made thre announcement, yet shortly thereafter there a load of bogus accounts going around and downvoting people, supposedly because the were/are associated with @steemcleaners. With those accounts (which has to be bots I looked at the steemd profile for @scapelhead which was the latest to hit me and there are more downvotes that I would think possible. I was shocked by what I saw. For a few days @flagfixer was keeping track and returning an upvote due to this, but I think they have already fallen by the wayside.
any idea who runs @flagfixer...its an idea worth supporting
I haven't found out. I'm not as good as you or @abh12345 at finding things like that just yet. I like the idea. It needs to be a bit more refined, since it seems the names are hand entered into the bot from one that are found and posted on their page. No 'activity' for 2 weeks now, so not sure if it's running still.
I wish I knew enough on that end of things to come up with something. I don't know maybe a FlagChecker so to speak. I'm sure there's data on each flag, have it check for multiples and then Leave a message 'Potential spam flagger has been caught' ...I think you get the idea.
I have noticed a few religious bots promoting the bible etc. I find that odd as I'd expect them to want to demonstrate good community etiquette. I think it has the effect of turning people away from their cause more than anything.
ha ha I spotted these too, and yes people are turned away by their behavior
Wow, this is really a perfect example of your love of black and white :) I do like how there have been changes to the sign up so not to have duplicate, bs accounts all the time! And in terms of lowest sign up numbers in July, I wonder if it could be because something so simple as it being summer time. There seems to be less daily action this month too (July), and it's something I just chalked up to people getting outside more. Too simply maybe?
ha ha funny onion - my supple pie charts are full of color :-)
You could be right about the summer, but then last summer we did not experience that trend.
ok @paulag, black and white and sometimes color, but definitely no gray lol
I didn't know that last summer, obviously I wasn't here then haha, but that is interesting! So you can just toss that little theory of mine then 😅
Hi @paulag, great to see some early signs of increased retention!
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I think we need a retention analysis. I am hoping @abh12345 will consider preparing it this time, if he has time. If not, i will get to it in a week or two. But yes there are early signs
Well, the whole Byteball thing invited a lot of unsavory account creations. I don't mind new account numbers being down.
There also have been efforts to expose/stop mass account creations from services such as Microworkers because bad actors were using real people to sign up and turn over the keys, so they can have dozens or hundreds of accounts.
Thanks for this report. It's good to see that Steemit.Inc took steps to limit fraudulent sign-ups. I got a spate of zero downvotes from new accounts with 25 Rep, and wondered what was going on, then found other Steemians blogging about it.
Why spend your time like that, creating fake accounts and malicious bots? I just don't understand some people.
these downvote accounts are a pain in the neck. I think its something I need to look into further. i was under the believe their activity was not as much now
One really great thing about Steemit is the community of savvy programmers and witnesses who quickly take action against things like this!
Same here 4 so far just over a week ago. Hopefully it will stop. I don't know the whole story or which one is correct. Supposedly someone got mad with @steemcleaners and created the accounts to downvote anyone the is possibly associated with them. All the accounts are Rep of 25 and all cast -100% downvote with just the starting SP. It shouldn't harm us, but it's still the idea of . 'We've cracked down on fraudulent signups and accounts. Then this happens.
they do it to make money
I don't understand how they're making any money. Like @tryskele said in the comment above, it was a bunch of brand new accounts with 25SP (mostly), giving downvotes of 0.00.
One of the weird things about Steemit. I try not to pay too much attention; it takes away from my writing and posting. :-)
@paulag always good posts. Your post was selected and voted by the curator @pataty69 project looking for excelent rewards on great content posts that can be followed on my trail at Steemauto.
as always, thank you
@actifit is a fitness dapp for SMTs.
lol I actually had that in the draft and took it out because if there was another dapp I would land myself in trouble for excluding them
My writs just hurts thinking about something trying to do almost 20k comments in a month.
lol so do mine
Thanks, you get my 2 cents ;). I'm struggling with one post a week!