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1. September posting and payout

September was an important month for the Steem blockchain and one that was not short of incident. A half-day blockchain outage on the 17th left the day 14,118 blocks short of the 28,800 daily maximum; the largest single interruption since Steem was launched back in March 2016. The Velocity hardfork on the 25th did not stop the blockchain running but led to five days of minimal posting and voting activity while devs patched issues and resources were re-charged. I’m sure it will be worth it in the long run.

Given the above, with six days affected out of September’s thirty, it is perhaps unsurprising to see overall posting metrics down by approximately 20-25%. The chart below for author number and combined post/comment numbers per day illustrates the outages.

The recovery following HF20 has seen daily posting numbers stabilise at a lower level, at least initially, with the Resource Credits system restricting both spammers and smaller users. The impact is felt across posts and comments alike, as seen below. But with Steem dApps already moving to onboard users through the free account creation process this is a situation that could change rapidly. A story for next month, perhaps.

Post payouts tell a similar September story of interruption as illustrated by the gold (author), silver (curation), and bronze (benefactor) daily chart below. But the averaging process of the reward pool means that nothing is lost but simply delayed, leading to a week of wild excess and high vote values once voting was restored after HF20. October’s numbers will be heady.

How did our Steem dApps fare over this tumultuous month?

2. Steem dApp breakdown and ranking

The Steem dApp ranking table is based on the information in the “app” field of each post of comment on the blockchain. Not all of the entries in the top 50 are recognisable dApps, with their own website, plug-in, platform or application. Three are coding libraries providing methods to access the blockchain. Two entries are generated by automated comments, from bidbots and from steemcleaners. But forty-five are solid applications that you can use to post to the blockchain and these forty-five are drawn from an overall list of hundreds.

Authors is distinct authors across the month. Many users will use more than one dApp so the sum in the Total Result exceeds the actual number of separate authors.

Posts includes both posts and comments.

Payouts now includes benefactor rewards in addition to author and curator payouts. The payouts in the table are those made within the month of September rather than payouts associated with content created in September, so a seven day offset (however for all daily charts in this post the latter approach is used).

The overall ranking used to order the table is an average of the author ranking and the post payout ranking. Numbers of posts have not been included in this ranking statistic due to the potential distortion from spam through some channels.

I am using the block.ops tool for this analysis. This applies the block transactions data directly and has allowed me to capture the "app" field as at the point of post creation. The above stats are thus unaffected by post edits which in previous analyses overwrote the “app” field data and skewed the figures towards Steemit where most editing took place.

I would add that the block.ops system is new and still under construction. All figures should be treated with caution.

A few stories drawn from the figures above…

3. vimm.tv and dlive

dLive, the gaming and streaming dApp left the Steem blockchain just before HF20. This will be their last appearance in the top50 table. But every cloud has a silver lining. Competition within the Steem dApps is strong and vimm.tv have already picked up the baton and are running with it up the table.

For me this demonstrates the level of development happening just below the surface of the Steem environment. There are plenty of developers ready to spring forth with their creations should others falter.

4. Musing, Actifit and SteemPeak

A quick case study of three well-known dApps from the top-half of the table to illustrate a point. Whilst overall stats may have been down over September there’s still plenty of growth to be found. Musing (Q&A dApp), Actifit (fitness dApp), and SteemPeak (general purpose blockchain front-end with beautiful UI) all posted solid and consistent daily author numbers across the month (ignoring the outages) suggesting strong and growing communities. This is a theme I plan to come back to in a separate post after a little more digging.

5. Artisteem

A different pattern of growth and activity can be seen with Artisteem, the art and creators dApp, which jumped up to fifteenth place on the table for September. Artisteem runs frequent contests which generate interest and posts. These contests periods (1-7 Sep, 13-19 Sep, 21 Sep - 3 Oct, 8-15 Oct) can be seen in the spikes of posting below.

While Artisteem number have risen significantly for September there's a clear difference to the posting patterns in the three dApps above, illustrating that there's more than one way to get your dApp moving.

6. New Entries

Three new entries in the 25-50 section of the table. Every month something new!

trips.teem (position 26) is for all things travel, from trip reviews to travel services to local recommendations. The site has been working for four months already in a Korean version but will be launching in English and Japanese in November.

You can read more about it here (English) or @trips.teem:
https://steemit.com/witness-category/@snackplus/what-is-trips-teem-and-witness-introduction?sort=new

dpoll.xyz (position 35) created by @emrebeyler for the Utopian hackathon (in one day!) is an application for polling. Add a poll or vote on the polls raised by other users. A simple idea but with great execution!

You can read more about dpoll here:
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@emrebeyler/introducing-dpoll-a-poll-app-on-the-top-of-steem-blockchain

share2steem (position 48 - listed by its former name of steemigram in the table) allows you to cross-post to Steem from other social media sites: currently Instagram, Twitter and Youtube. Handy if you’re a social media giant!

You can read more about share2steem and its renaming here:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@share2steem/steemigram-becomes-share2steem-new-features-and-major-improvements

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Tools and Scripts

I used the block.ops analysis system to produce this study. Block.ops is an open-source analysis tool designed for heavy-duty analyses of the Steem blockchain data. It is currently under construction and this is the second complete analysis from its depths.

You can find the repository for block.ops here:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/block.ops

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Relevant Links and Resources

Links are provided in the text.

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Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem

This analysis is of data from the Steem blockchain which is an open source project. Many of the individual applications are also open source projects in their own right.

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Thanks for reading!