RE: Delegation Issue
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%.
I'm aware that many accounts are socks. There is no data that breaks that down, and all that there is to go on is how many accounts exist. Ok, so let's assume that you, Bernie, and 98 of your friends and associates made thousands of accounts. I have no way to quantify what the average number of accounts you guys made is.
So, let's just pull a number out of the air. Let's say you guys averaged 2k accounts each, and there's 100 of you. That's 200k accounts that were never any more than socks. Guess what? That is a rounding error in my calculations. The figure of 1m+ was just simplifying and rounding down from 1.2M.
Retention is almost certainly below 5% at this time. It was only ~7.5% YOY a year or so ago, and we presently have ~half the accounts we had then. There's just no good data on how many accounts there ever were made by actual users, or how many remain in operation. Your low estimate is 7%, and my high is 5%.
I'm not gonna hold my breath and turn blue until you agree to 6%. It's not really germaine to the issue, which is that Steem has been so breathtakingly mismanaged that despite the shiny financial incentive to create content on the blockchain, it has abysmal user retention, far worse than Fakebook - which is hemorrhaging users itself.
5 - 7% is higher than I think retention is, and lower than you think retention is, but we're only off by 2 points, and probably agree on why retention is so bad.
I know of 300k accounts that was offered for sale by someone milking the signup page. That's in addition to socks, mined accounts, non-user accounts, other signup milkers, etc.
Anyway, of course, yes, we agree retention is bad. Even if my highest estimate is correct (and I wouldn't have high confidence in that, as it is was always meant as an extreme/unlikely estimate), that is still pretty low.
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.