Steemit Journey - When are Steemians most active on a typical day?

Hey Steemians! Yesterday, I had a discussion with my dear friend @mrshev and somehow it led to the question on when are Steemians most active on a typical day? My initial thought was that user activities should be rather consistent through the day since Steemit is a global platform. While @mrshev thought it should follow some kind of cycle, perhaps aligned with the wake-sleep time of certain parts of the world (e.g. USA).

Source

As you might know, I have been tinkering with the Steem API lately. So, I decided to write a simple python script to gather data from the Steem blockchain so that I can find the answer to the question ("when are Steemians most active on a typical day?" ).

At first, I thought by using "get_discussions_by_created" function, I should be able to get all the info I needed with less than 5 lines of codes. However, I later got to realize that the function had a limit of 100 posts per retrieval. Hence, I needed to use the "start_permlink" and "start_author" parameters to get the next set of posts after I hit the limit. In the end, I decided to use a limit of 51 posts (the 51st post of each batch is used as the starting post for the next batch) and loop it through an arbitrary number. In this case, I loop it for 2000 times, which will return the past 100,000 posts. Each result is then written to a CSV file.

Here is the script which I have written and please pardon my noobish programming 😂:

from steem import Steem
s = Steem()
permlink = ""
author = ""
csv_file = open("output.csv", "w")
for x in range(2000):
    if x == 0:
        query = {"limit": 51}
    else:
        query = {"limit": 51,
        "start_permlink": permlink,
        "start_author": author
        }
    results = s.get_discussions_by_created(query)
    for y in range(50):
        permlink = results[50]['permlink']
        author = results[50]['author']
        tempauthor = results[y]['author']
        temppermlink = results[y]['permlink']
        postdate = results[y]['created']
        line = tempauthor + "," + temppermlink + "," + postdate
        print(line)
        csv_file.write(line)
        csv_file.write("\n")
csv_file.close()

To be able to see a proper trend, I needed to have at least 1 week of data. In the end, I gathered over 250,000 posts info (between 24 May to 31 May). Oddly, the blockchain seemed to keep only 1 week of information in proper chronological order. Posts after 24 May seemed to be no longer in chronological order anymore. Perhaps someone can help enlighten me on this .

After gathering the data, I used Excel to plot a simple graph below:

Behold the Steemit circadian rhythm! Haha.. Each bar represents an hour and we can see that for the past week, the most active hour was 28 May, 3pm GMT with 2324 new posts created! In general, it seems that Steemians are consistently more active between 1300-1900 GMT. And we usually "sleep" between 0000-0500 GMT. I thought this is quite interesting and decided to share this with everyone.

@mrshev was right and I was wrong, Steemit activity do follow a cycle, at least for now. I think as more Steemians start to join, we probably should see flatter graph. What is your view on this? Any other Steemit trends that you will like me to explore? Thanks for reading!