Has Steemit been slow lately? If so, why?
Someone in discord mentioned to me they felt Steemit was experiencing slower traffic than previously.
My response was "Is it really slow?" I haven't been here as long as he has, so I don't have a basis for comparison. So I needed to establish, is it slow or not slow.
And by slow, what we're really talking about is why are posts not making as much reward. This is measurable, and thankfully, someone has already done most of the hard work for me. @paulag does a post every month benchmarking the statistics of the Steemit platform. So I've copied some charts from her last three months of post success to see if we can establish a trend.
@paulag How Well Do Blog Posts Really do
1 July - 23 July
This chart shows us a partial month, and does not include actual payouts for these posts. But it does giveus a base we can compare the following months to. I want to circle the $100 plus categories, this is where we will make our initial comparisons. 2889 posts reached at least the $100 payout level in the first three weeks of July. What happened in August?
This month Paula gives us the reward total to go along with the number of posts in each category. Again, going to the posts that made $100 minimum, our total for August came in at 2535. Keep in mind, this is the entire month of August, whereas the previous chart was only a partial month for July. In addition to the fall off from the top reward recipients, we see the number of posts with No payout whatsoever has doubled month to month. Meanwhile, the number of posts in the next most valuable category at $51-100 stayed relatively flat. But September we really see things faltering, and this is where the complaints we are seeing around the platform come from. In September we went from 2535 posts over $100 in August, down to 1305 for September. Additionally, we see that the $50-100 category has dropped by almost 1000 posts. While this month the No Payout and $0-1 stayed flat. Thanks to Paula's inclusion in total payouts, we can also see total payout went down by nearly $400,000! We should be looking forward to a similar trend continuing when the October Report comes out. Why? October did not begin well with the multiple DDoS attacks on the main page. People have been moving funds to BTC in anticipation of not one but two upcoming Hard Forks in BTC. With the price of BTC escallating in recent days, people don't want to be left behind and are cashing in all the chips they can, affecting all the Alt Coins. These are two big factors which have pushed Steem from a Summer high of over $1.60 down to $1.04 this morning. But there is positive as well. People are learning about "Front Ends" for the steem blockchain, so if steemit isn't working good, we have options! Summer is over for the northern hemisphere, kids are back in school, so people are back to their computers more. Advertising is going out to draw new people onto the platform. People continue to flock to Steemit, and as new users grow, their influence over the reward pool will grow as well. The Blue Paper outlines a path forward which we hope will push us in the right direction over the next three months. We can help ourselves! Advertisement go to reddit and random blogging platforms or social media to encourage people to come to Steem. Onboarding. which means we need better how-to guides, and we need to be helping new users in a one on one fashion. If you know how the place works, you should be sharing the knowledge and helping new users get thier feet on the ground. Here is a simple guide to help new users start off at steemit: So we have survived a tumultuous summer. But the key is that we have survived! We're still here, the platform is still here, still growing, and with a bright future ahead. It is a pivotal time for Steem. We have a chance to establish ourselves before the introduction to the masses by way of SMT. We can still see STEEM go to the Moon, and every Steem you hold now will only become more valuable for the future! While there are not record new arrivals to Steem, every new user you can help find their way helps this community to grow stronger. Please make new users feel welcome, and be kind when they make the easy mistakes of a newb. If you are interested in the data, and like playing with numbers, join @paulag and the rest of the #bisteemit community over in the Steemit BC Chat Server.
@paulag August Posts Bench Marking
Moving Forward
References
Unless I'm misunderstanding how this works, the same amount of STEEM should be available in the reward fund so the payouts should never increase or decrease when viewed in terms of STEEM.
When viewed in terms of SBD obviously they will fluctuate based on the market price of STEEM, so I'm guessing that the lower gross payout value for Sept vs August was just due to a lower STEEM price. Let me know if I'm saying something incorrect here.
You are spot on, and thank you for helping!!
Interesting post Mike. Steemit seems to be at a pivot point. It needs to show some forward momentum. It needs to make some visible and appreciable changes to the interface.
And it needs to find ways to improve the rather dreadfully low retention rate. It is all very well pouring more and more new users into the bucket but if the great big hole in the bottom isn't fixed then the water level is never going to rise.
Take a look at the daily stats from @arcange.
Daily authors and posts has flatlined since mid-June. And comments are dropping rapidly. How can that be when total users are increasing so much??
The clue might be in the only other stat that is going up - Total Upvotes / Curation. Why might that be 😉
Do we need to call in The Terminator before the Skynet falls in on us and steemit is totally overrun by the bots 😎
I think your last point there is a key. So many people are figuring out how to create bots and/or self voting rings that these "New Users" are not really new at all. Or even users for that matter. Just a means to an end.
As long as this is a community that is relied on to police itself, there are too few @steemcleaners and @sherlockholmes to catch everyone gaming the system. The dev team supposedly has something up their sleeve according to @sneak, but as long as @ned is talking about SMT and not the platform itself, I don't know how much faith I have in their work on steemit.
I think you might be missing the part about how smt ties into new changes in the platform, also how much time it takes to curate. It may be that people are spending a lot more time curating than writing posts.
There are bots, but there is really only 1 good pay for upvote service, with a garunteed ROI @minnowbooster. If im wrong about that, show me the data. I don't see this army of bots.. I see a few new players... But not a significant number
The paid upvote bots are not necessarily what is being referred to as a bot here.
I think bots is a term being thrown around for any sort of automated vote. This would include streemian and steemvoter. People who are creating their own self voting steemvoter voting rings. The terminology is applied loosely.
But there are a ton more paid upvote bots per the way you are defining the them even than when I started, whether they are giving decent ROI or not is moot if we're simply referring to the "army of bots", find a partial list here: Steem Bot Tracker.
Per your definition of the term though, you are correct, we don't have an army of bots, we have a army of farm accounts coming in just to vote for each other and build up their SP in a way that harms the community.
I'd like to see the data. Sure people set each other on autovote, and it's based more on personal connection than manual curation of talent. I don't have a problem w that. If it's not spam, then it's mine to ignore. However, I'm open to believing in these things .. I'm sure a certain query would she'd some light on this, but I don't know which one
I sometimes wonder if the witnessses we vote for has an negative influence on the network. If a witness with a bad Internet Connection gets lots of vote, could that influence the speed of the network overall?
The short answer is No.
I am sure an actual witness can give a better explanation, but each witness processes "blocks". The top 20 witnesses get most of the blocks, everyone else is vying for a 21st block that they get in some sort of sequence. If a witness misses a block it goes to the next witness. There are ways to track how many missed blocks each witness has if you would like to consider that as you make your witness votes.
There's also the fact that you and I have very little actual voice in who the top witnesses are. Our witness votes weigh based on our SP, just like our upvotes, so the most powerful SP holders ultimately are the ones deciding who the top 20 witnesses are. I'll refer you to a quote from @lukestokes in our @newsteem interview: HERE.
Ultimately though, for this issue, the internet speed and reliability of the witnesses does not impact the performance of the main site as far as I am aware. This is also why the blockchain remains intact and accessible by secondary nodes like esteem, busy, and chain, even when the main site is down.
Okay. Now I get It.
Thanks for the explanation.
Do you still Buy that version of DDoS attacks?
Just take a glance to 'this chart' and share with us your thoughts and conclusions over there in the comments section. }:)
Attempting to live the life of the objective reporter, I have to report the official claim being put out there by the corporate leads. Do I have concerns, in the immortal words of Sarah Palin "You Betcha!"
Based on the fact that I am accessing the blockchain this morning via busy.org rather than steemit.com due to more Gateway errors, I am inclined to believe there is more going on than we are being led to believe of course.
I'll take a look at the post you referenced for sure.
I totally agree with your noble claims as an objective reporter @mikepm74. But when the intuitive curiosity of our well founded trustworthy technical experience itches beyond logic. You have no choice but dig deeper and explore the entrails of the monster until the bottom to find the right answers. }:)
There is nothing wrong with focusing on the busy front end. This type of application diversity is what protects us. If it's "friendly fire", as some suspect, doesn't matter to me. Busy is getting better. I almost like it. And right now I'm on steemitstage
hi @mikepm74, thank you very much for referencing me and my posts. seems there is a slow down on steemit and that is rather obvious to those of us that have been here a few months.
I am currently pulling another data set together to look and the downturn in more detail
probably because many users are steemit
Another Great one!!
This post has received a 7.67 % upvote from @buildawhale thanks to: @mikepm74. Send at least 0.50 SBD to @buildawhale with a post link in the memo field for a portion of the next vote.
To support our curation initiative, please vote on my owner, @themarkymark, as a Steem Witness
not only is the traffic slow the site is loading slow regardless of internet speed. It is taking me a lot longer to load a post or upload a post or upvote to go through. I have noticed that the site is running slower is this happening for others? I like your discussion Here is my #discussion post.
strange, kinda off topic question... but how did you make that text so small and centered under your picture? (Still learning markup) I've never seen that before!! I usually just use
for image sources.... but whatever you did looks a lot more appealing :)
No problem! yeah the markdown is a pain to learn, I've been learning from a friend. Use <> Sub
< sub > without the spaces, and then < /sub> at the end
If you want it centered under the image you need to get a little more intense:
< center> < img src = "Your.url.here"> < /img> < /center > < center >< sub> Image Sounce Info < /sub > < /center>
I hope that makes sense!
awesome!! Thank you so much :)