PLANKTON #541,753—The Mystery Of The Missing Whales. Or Not.

Ever had this happen to you?

You go searching one topic or subject, only to end up studying and puzzling over another? And another. And possible more anothers? Well, that's what happened to me last week in a number of ways. I'd like to share just one of them now. It's a pretty circuitous route, so bare with me.

I Know. I've Got No Life

I've been looking at the voting power graphs @arcange produces as part of his daily statistical reports. Studying them day to day, I wasn't seeing a whole lot of upward movement through the ecosystem Steemit has (plankton/red fish to minnow to dolphin to orca to whale), so I decided to take a look at them on a monthly basis instead.

The following images and graphs are either from @arcange's posts, the steemitboard and blog, or steemdb. To differentiate my commentary from any other on the images, I will italicize mine for the time being.

These are the graphs from 07-24-17 as a starting point. You can see there were 42 whales, 230 orcas, 1,133 dolphins, 4,803 minnows, 37,853 plankton/red fish and a whopping 231,812 inactive or dead fish.

For The Newbies

Now, there's some criteria as to what constitutes activity and inactivity in order to end up as a dead fish. From the @steemitboard blog we read:

If you become inactive for more than 7 days, SteemitBoard will transform you immediately into the dead fish, regardless of your current level!

Inactive, for SteemitBoard it means that:

you have not published any post
you have not written any comment
you have not made any upvote

A dead fish can resuscitate and return to its proper place in the Steemit ocean by meeting the minimum action required basically immediately.

The other thing to be aware of are that the levels or classes (whether you're a plankton/red fish, etc. all the way up to whale) are determined thusly:

I find the numbers hard to read without commas so I'll break them down:

Plankton/Red Fish—0-999,999 Vests
Minnows—1,000,000 to 9,999,999 Vests
Dolphins—10,000,000 to 99,999,999 Vests
Orcas—100,000,000 to 999,999,999 Vests
Whales—1,000,000,000 Vests and up

Next Graph. Yaaaay...

So, with that in mind, we fast forward to a few days ago, 01-24-18. Seven months have passed, and at a quick glance, little appears changed in the graphs.

That's more or less because the ratios in each column are kind of keeping pace with one another. A closer look allows us to see that yes the numbers of each class of ocean critter has increased, with the largest gains, as you might expect, happening in the lower ranks. The number of plankton/red fish has grown nearly five times to 189,126, minnows are up by 2,000 to 6,812, Dolphins 240 to 1,373 and orcas climbing 10 to 240. I note that the number of dead fish has doubled.

Then, you get to the whales. There were 42, now there's only 36. Instead of ticking up or holding, they decreased.

Hunh. Whale Count Went Down You Say?

Interesting. My first thought was, they cashed out, or began the process of powering down. So, I began checking the months in between last July and now and discovered that there were at least as many as 44 whales, making the drop even larger.

No other level suffered a decrease, but there was no clear indication of what might have happened, since there would probably be a net effect anyway—whales powering down or cashing out, orcas becoming whales and others moving up or back. Too, new whales might have brought their earnings from some other cryptocurrency over to Steem and immediately became whales or some other ocean faring creature.

In other words, there could be all kinds of factors involved with all of the numbers, including the decline in whales.

He's Slower Than He Looks

As I was pondering this, I realized there could be something else going on. Something that didn't make a whole lot of sense on the surface of it, but that also had to be considered.

What might that be?

Maybe some of the whales were no longer active, due to no votes, no posts, and/or no comments.

Instead of just dwelling on why that might have happened, I decided to go look. Steemdb.com has a lot of information you can peruse, including ordering users by the amount of Vests they possess. The list begins with the highest amount first, so it was a matter of clicking through the pages to count up the whales.

Finally! A Nice List

This is the fourth page of the accounts list ranked by the amount of Vests. You'll see that the numbers are color coded in red for whales and purple for orcas. This is where the transition between the two occurs. With 10 users per page and only six coded red on page 4, that meant I'd found all 36 whales.

Now, I could have probably stopped there, but there were names among the whales that I hadn't ran into yet, so I decided to see what I could find. I started with the Steemit account and worked my way down the first page.

That list looks like this:

Now, I came across all kinds of things in my search, but as this post is getting on in length, I won't try to share all of it here. Rather, I'll concentrate on what I found when I checked the usernames listed as whales on steemdb at steemitboard for their current activity status.

Thanks For All The Dead Fish

I typed in the first username, which is steemit—the main Steemit company account. It did not come back as a whale, but a dead fish. I thought okay, that probably makes sense, because the Steemit account probably isn't commenting, posting and upvoting.

When I dug further, I found it actually did have a post from nearly two years ago, but no comments and no votes and nothing in the intervening time.

Next, I entered misterdelegation. Up came another dead fish.

Slipping Backwards

I thought, okay, that's interesting. No engagement on Steemit then, but the name suggested something else to me. Steem Power delegation. And it dawned on me that delegation wasn't included in the activity criteria the Steemitboard had set. But, something else wasn't making sense. I'd counted up the 36 whales, but now I was down two.

Just to be sure, I checked misterdelegation for actual delegation, and then went back to the steemit account. The latter was not delegating to anyone, but sure enough, the former was. 10 different accounts are currently receiving a combined amount of 7,991,781.91 SP. With 10.5 million SP, there's still more than a whale's amount of SP available for misterdelegation.

Pushing Forward

I kept going. Steem was third in line. This is the place, as it turns out, where everyone's steem account is created. On steemworld.org, you can go watch new accounts show up as they're created. This is also where the new users receive their small initial delegation of SP, so you can see that being delegated as well as returned.

In all, the steem account is delegating out nearly 8 million SP, too, just to many more users.

Number four on the list was freedom. It was one of the ones I was unfamiliar with, so I popped it into the steemitboard search window and came up with, you guessed it, another dead fish. That meant the top four whale-sized accounts were all considered inactive. I went and checked delegation. Six delegatees are receiving a total of 7,428,642.51 delegated SP.

At least four of those accounts freedom is delegating to are votebots, hardly something a person would do if they were disinterested or disillusioned with Steemit. I say that because the dead fish accounts are often looked at as only being low SP and basically abandoned. My guess is that still is primarily the case, but I'd already stumbled upon four huge accounts that were, in my mind, far from inactive.

Well, That Was Anticlimactic. Ish.

The mystery of the lost whales I started to solve had twisted into something else, while still leaving the mystery. If I'm down four whales to begin with, are four other accounts then being considered whales?

I don't know, but I doubt it. In checking all 36 whales as designated on steemdb.com, there were actually 15 whales in total that come up as dead fish or inactive on steemitboard. Most of those are delegating SP. In fact, most of the active whales are too, which shouldn't come to any surprise.

I asked arcange about considering delegation in his criteria for activity, thinking that it might cause some change with his graphs. Now, I'm not so sure. I haven't heard back from his initial reply that he would look into it—I'm sure he's got a lot of other important things to do, so no worries.

If I find out anything, or he decides to post any findings or changes to his graphs, I will either pass it along personally or try to highlight his post.

In the meantime, I'm moving on to other things.