Steemit is Only Just Now Recovering from Hardfork 20

Even worse, it is possible we still have not totally righted the ship.

Alexa is the most used site in the world for measuring internet traffic and website popularity rankings. Over the last few months, since the hardfork in September, it has shown Steemit tumbling in ranking. This isn't just by a few hundred - this is by a few thousand spots. There are now thousands of sites that are getting more hits than Steemit that were not only three months ago. On the graph below I have added a red line to show when the hardfork happened, and frankly, the results pretty much speak for themselves. Our rankings tanked right when the hardfork happened.

Correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation; however, the backlash against the hardfork, and the number of people who left the site around that time, was very obvious. Just look for any of the hundreds of articles complaining about how broken the site was for weeks afterwards. Tons of people said they were leaving, and it is clear they were serious. They have not come back, and at this point there is no reason to think they will, unfortunately. It also appears that we have had a very difficult time replace them with new users, as we are only now beginning to pull out of this nosedive...hopefully. As you can see at the end of the graph, things are starting to balance out for the past couple weeks, but that has been going on for such a short time that it may be an outlier.

Some may wonder about a previous drop earlier in the year, but I think that can be attributed to the end of Steem's remarkably high price early in the year. That attracted a lot of bandwagoners who left as Steem fell to only a few dollars. These most recent losses are worse, as they represent a loss in more long-time users. Recent loss in value may explain some of the recent loss as well, but I am inclined to think problems during the hardfork that basically broke the website helped lead to Steem's decline in value.

I do still believe in the Steem experiment and that we will pull out of this slump, since the fundamentals of the currency and the idea of an anonymous blockchain-based blog are still strong. However it is important to understand just hard a bad hardfork can fork the website...