At the beginning of 2017 there was no #polish tag and really no future for Polish community. But, you know, you need to set a goal first and then find a way to do it. That goal was really simple - with small steps we must built something from the scratch. In my opinion we have done it! And I will show you some numbers.

New users

People create the community. And in fact, their number determines all the other factors - number of posts, votes, comments and finally the height of payouts. This should always be the first and most important thing to consider when thinking about growth.

I consider a user to be a new member of the Polish community at the time of adding his first post to #polish tag.

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It can be clearly seen in the whole year that two months stand out mainly when we look at the most new users' posts - June and December. However, let's not discard the remaining months, because new users' posts were still appearing, and it looks much better in this summary:

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Authors and posts

New and old users become authors when they create posts. This is the second important factor in creating a community - people need to be active. This is best seen when creating new content. What if we took the number of authors and their posts? Red is number of posts, blue is the number of authors:

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Again, there is a clear change for June and December, although other months (those between) were not that bad. We can also see that despite the steady flow of new people on #polish, the number of both authors and posts did not increase linearly, but with large fluctuations it increased and decreased.
I also have a second chart prepared, in which I add the number of posts from day to day:

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Exactly what I wrote before - nice and steady growth, which only accelerates in two places. A good way to the future.

Comments

The second measurable value associated with growth of community and interaction between users are comments. It is obvious that with the number of posts, the number of answers to them will also increase, but will it be such a big leap? Day after day, it looks like this:

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The theory above works in practice. The number of comments is fully dependent on the number of posts. And when one grows, it pulls the other. And does Polish community become more or less talkative over time? You need to take both the average (blue) and median (violet) of comments per post:

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Maybe you do not see this exactly, but both lines from summer highest values are slowly falling. There may be several reasons - maybe new users are focused only on writing and earning, and forget to view someone else's work? Or maybe the content is less and less interesting and it’s not worth to comment?

Votes

The next interactive element of the community is voting. They directly affect the payout of the posts, which is the element that brings most of the new people to this platform. Is it similar to comments in this case? Let's look at the sum day after day:

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It’s very similar to the previous charts. Let's focus on the average (light blue) and median (dark blue) votes per post:

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Small accuracy, let's limit it a bit to see more:

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The end of the year is quite disturbing. From the beginning of November both values are slowly falling, which means that the voting group is still the same, but with the increasing number of posts, there are fewer votes per post. It does not look good, we will see how it will look in the new year.

Payouts

Finally we come to the payouts. They decide about the final earnings on the platform. And although recently there is a lot of confusion connected with it, because until the end you do not know how much the author receives, the values from the posts are the only values that we can compare. At the beginning the payout sum day after day:

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This graph is very interesting because it shows fairly large differences between June and December from the remaining months. And although the average number of votes dropped at the end of the year, it all goes very nice. This is probably due to the big difference between Steem and SBD, thanks to which many people powered up their accounts and increased their voting power. If it looks so good, let's look at the average (red) and median (brown) payouts per post:

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We need to change the scale:

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And to be honest - this chart does not mean anything. The changes are so big that I’m unable to create any conclusion. I will have to think about it...

What's next?

Looking at all these numbers and values, I’m optimistic about the future of Polish community. During the next few days there will be discussions about our goals for this year and how we can implement them. Together we will manage them - the worst is already behind us!

Public data

All data from this article was taken from database and I’m sharing it in Google file, so if anyone wants to know more details - feel free to use it!

Image from header designed by Dooder / Freepik.