RE: Delegation Issue
Hard fork 21 actually failed this test for quite a while
You mean 20?
Again, it's not personal. It's purely professional
Taken as such.
By all means, vote against all of the current witnesses (indeed especially the witnesses at the time of HF20) but it is my sincere belief that other witnesses could do no better under the circumstances, and could certainly do worse. It is not even clear to me that you know what witnesses do. But that may not matter to you and wanting to seeing someone fall on a sword is a defensible response to bad outcomes.
You literally have three jobs. Make sure the content can continue coming in. Make sure the content can be voted on. And make sure there are new people coming in to help drive the platform. Everything else is secondary at best and way down the line at worst.
I'm afraid I must disagree to a point. Those tasks are important for sure, but as you say the user interaction is still shrinking month after month. What good is that? Looking at the broader picture I do believe that we need to balance making progress in improving the platform with the uninterrupted operation of the platform. Rejecting all forks or rejecting all forks with are not rigorously tested and audited (nearly equivalent in practice at this juncture) would certainly optimize uptime and minimize risks but it would not necessarily optimize for improvement which can ultimately turn around the (lack of) growth trajectory. My view is that this balance takes precedence, even though it isn't always an easy task.
Why? There are over 1 million accounts on Steem, and less than 10000 remain active. All votes for witnesses cast by abandoned accounts will remain effective votes FOREVER since witness votes never expire. What possible impact can current accounts have on witnesses unless possessing substantial stake?
Please, you're killing me. I can only laugh so hard before rupturing my spleen.
Why are there over 2 billion Facebook accounts, etc, as of 2019, and yet less than a billion are active? There could be many reasons why. But regardless, it's human nature. It's normal.
Comparing retention rates between Fakebook and Steem illustrates the difference between normal and abysmal performance. Your figures would provide Fakebook an overall retention rate of 50%. To keep math simple I'm going to estimate Steem retention, and the contribution of socks, which are multiple accounts of one user. We know that some highly staked users have thousands of accounts, and this dramatically impacts estimates of user retention on Steem.
Fakebook user retention is 50% overall, and over 1M accounts on Steem with ~10k active users leaves 1% overall user retention on Steem. That's not normal. It's abysmal. It's 50 times worse on Steem which claims users receive nominal financial incentive for participation than on Fakebook, which makes no such claim.
Given the motivation financial incentive provides, it's highly revelatory of just how poor Steem management is at supporting society. Is it possible that paying people discourages them from participation? No! Not at all. What is factually provable is that Steem is paying the wrong people in such a way as to drive everyone else away.
There's no other explanation for the monstrous dichotomy in user retention, and why I have repeatedly and often pointed out the fundamental difference between profiteering and investment. Steem is so codified as to reward profiteering, and society is based on investment and building civilization - the opposite of profiteering and the destruction of civilization.
It's completely bass ackwards from what it should be doing to support society.
A very large number of those million+ Steem accounts never corresponded with users. It was people who mined or registered large numbers of accounts because they could (either due to the nature of mining, or because the registration portal was not able to block all abuses).
There is much lower retention than 50%, I'm pretty sure, but it isn't 1% (10k/1m).
Well, I dunno because the data is not provided. I estimated, and will not die on that hill.
I am confident user retention is <5% because it was ~7.5% about a year ago, and @arcange published this today:
Not a lot of bots make posts, although many vote, and some comment. The useful metric in the graph is active authors, and that's below 10k.
That chart doesn't show retention of new users. It shows active users. For example, if you get one new user per day, each is active for a day and then quits, but one of those users sticks around past the week, a daily-active-user chart similar to the one above would be a flat line at one over the course of the week (or perhaps briefly bumping up to two) but retention is actually 14%.
It is very hard to measure because we don't know how many new accounts created (and did not persist as active users) ever corresponded to users, but we do know that many did not.
The active users present today are the overall users retained to date. There are a few users that are new that graph doesn't show, but not thousands. Even if 10k new users weren't shown on that chart, it would only temporarily raise our overall retention rate to ~2% - until 99% of them left. It does show that otherwise we have somewhere south of 10k content creators presently creating on Steem, which is less than 1% of total accounts created. Many other factors may affect that number, but I reckon it's pretty close to reality.
Of the 1m+ accounts that have been created on Steem, only a bit less than 10k are making posts today, or about 1% of them. No matter how you slice it, that's bad.
No you're missing the point. 10k or so is probably right but 1 million is way off. That number could be 50k (20% retention) or 100k (10% retention) or 200k (5%) but it definitely isn't a million.
I'm personally responsible for mining some thousands (maybe 10k or more I'm really not even sure of the number without doing some analysis) of those accounts with no user ever being associated with any of them (as well as creating probably a few dozen accounts, again with no users), and I'm not even remotely alone.
I actually think the high point in early 2018 probably represents a good fraction of the total users ever active, maybe 30-50%. For one thing a huge number joined during that period alone and for another the high price probably brought back a lot of the users who were here earlier and quit, if only to cash out some stake they may have left behind. So that puts the total at something like 100-150k and the retention at 7-10%.
How make fake accounts are there on Facebook? I run into thousands of fake accounts each year, at least, during the 2010's. Some years ago, I ran across hundreds of Star Wars accounts. I was befriending dozens of Luke Skywalker accounts, not pages and not groups and not events. There are so many fake accounts. I have made dozens of accounts myself on Facebook. Younger people are fleeing Facebook these past few years. Millions and millions of people have been leaving Facebook. Some go to Gab and some go to Minds. Some come to Facebook and Bitchute, etc, etc. So many are not using any social networking. So many people go on Facebook because they have to and not because they want to. There have been millions of people who were forced onto Facebook. I was living in Vietnam for 5 years, 2012-2017, and I saw first hand how Facebook was used in Vietnam for example.
I have no idea how many fake fakebook accounts there are, and just used the figures you supplied for it.
Do you think there are less than 10 million 'real' fakebook accounts? That would be comparable user retention to Steem's. l am sure we both reckon there are more fakebook users than that - although we have no data we can trust. All sources of data I have seen have shown user retention on Steem to be far lower than FAANG users. Whether any of that data has even remote resemblance to fact I have no expectation of knowing.
None of that actually addresses my point, which is that adding economic incentive to participate in social media is actually an enormous incentive, and despite that incentive Steem is doing worse retaining it's users than platforms without that incentive, and that indicates that management of those Steem platforms is so abysmally bad that it more than compensates for the economic incentive.
Currently, it does seem that Gab and Minds and Bitchute are doing better than Steem and all the Steem apps. That's the competition and may the better networks win. It seems that Minds is bigger than Steem. So, the Steem people should be enraged and motivated to do better than Minds. If they don't don't hurry up, then they will continue to decline. I don't doubt that.
With a very few exceptions (I can think of one anonymous early adopter with a pretty big account that suddenly disappeared and no one ever heard from; we suspect he or she may have died) the abandoned accounts have almost no stake and don't matter. Apart from those odd cases like sudden death people aren't in the habit of abandoning large holdings. If leaving most will at least power down, and certainly many did.
A lot of those million accounts never voted for witnesses either. New users who signed up looked around for a bit and then left.
Given that you are replying to low stake accounts, the dismissal of the stake wielded by zombies is facile.
I'm dismissing inactive accounts from being so much of the witness voting pool so as to overwhelm active users' votes, which it certainly isn't. Active users add value regardless of stake, so there is value in engagement. I don't personally pay attention to how much stake someone may have when engaging, and often it isn't possible to tell anyway (due to multiple accounts).
On this we strongly agree. Sadly, HF21 is going to dramatically reduce engagement by largely demonetizing it.
We at least have that to look forward to.
I LOL'ed.
Thanks!