RE: User Retention: This is Our Community
I have five accounts but three of them post, so I'm not sure if I'm part of the solution or part of the problem. (The fourth will post eventually, the fifth was created in error because of the SteemConnect bug.)
When it comes to retention, the question for me is who are we retaining? A lot of those new accounts are just spammers, plagiarists, and phishers. A big chunk of the rest are people who either have nothing of interest to post about or want to treat it like Twitter or Instagram.
So to me, we need to be hunting down the new accounts who are interesting and/or community-builders, and making sure we get most of them enough support of one sort or another to inspire them to stick around and grow their accounts. We're not yet very good at this but I think we're a lot better than we were even a month ago as more of the minnow/dolphin community has picked up on this.
We're never going to be able to guarantee that everyone good gets found, but as long as we're bringing along new classes continually, and can convince those people to do some of the same work, the growth can be exponential.
Mass adoption anytime soon scares me, though. We don't have enough of a support network to lift up more than a few dozen good new posters a month at this point. If we have tens of thousands of 15 SP legitimate users at a time, I don't know how that ends well. I guess the people who can make friends with dolphins will do ok and everyone else will leave.
Well, the fact that new users come and goes doesn't change the fact that there aren't some good content creators. I think we should try as much as possible to create schools / classes for minnows, educate them about all the huge expectations they carried along to steemit and make them more focus knowing well that patience's and consistency pays off.
And again I think when bringing new users to steemit we should stop this lies of "COME TO STEEMIT, POST AND MAKE MONEY". It doesn't work that way, I personally was told that lie and it made me had this huge expectation of seeing Steemit as a quick making money scheme. It hasn't been easy for me and other babies on the platform so far but with the help of @whatsup and others I feel not been only.
So lets always try to encourage the new ones coming, educate them and lets see how it goes.
Thanks at all
I belive what might really help is if Steemit adopts a "categories" UI. That way bloggers can blog and Meme'ers can Meme, jokes can be shared,and photographers can post their art... all in their unique little corners of Steemit!
Well, what we also see is some start and stop and start and stop. Which I am fine with as long as they don't complain about the time and earnings they missed.
Your post also made me think we should try to find ways to explain the compounding growth of an account. For each steem you earn the next one becomes easier. At some point around 1000 sp that increases really quickly.
Or even if they complain for a bit and then get down to work again. I'm all for giving people some time for self-indulgence as long as it's temporary.
I know about compounding growth but since I skipped that range completely by buying Steem I'd be interested in hearing about how that inflection point has worked for people.
It works well as long as the price of STEEM is up! Personally, I become discouraged with posting when the price keeps dropping or remains low.