Honestly? Two reasons. Firstly, SteamData went away and I really don't enjoy working with SQL. Secondly, I'm not sure it's a useful piece of information for us to make sense of anything going on.
Like I said, as long as the number of bot accounts on the steem blockchain is increasing more than proportionally to the number of accounts which are "active" on the blockchain, churn rates decrease. It's not an indicator which is useful for communicating what we want to know.
And step one involves determining exactly what we want to know before we go in looking for signals. We have to be aware of what we're looking for.
Additionally, what we're looking for has to be in the form of a question and we have to be ready to accept any answer that falls out. A lot of your analysis lately has started with a question from which only one type of answer is going to be acceptable – boosting the steem blockchain as an investment platform. Which is somewhat disappointing, because historically you have done a fair amount of analysis which has returned negative indicators. But since this latest contraction (which seems to correlate with you having become invested as a witness as well), there seems to be a lot of internal pressure on you to hype the blockchain.
That doesn't lead to excellent analysis.
If you go looking for positive indicators and throw away indicators that aren't positive, you will inevitably find positive indicators. They may not be indicating anything real, but you will find them.
So let's start from the top. What is it that we really want to know?
I would suggest that an important question is, "is content creation on the steem blockchain by non-bot creators increasing or decreasing?" A good secondary question might be, "is the content becoming more monocultural/mono-subject or more diverse?"
"Churn" isn't going to be a useful metric. Instead, if we really want to know whether the value of the blockchain is increasing or decreasing in a real sense (as opposed to its worth), we have to look at the reason that it's a useful platform – and that is the presence or absence of content.
The guy that does @trufflepig would be good to have here, because that system does regular analysis of the content on the blockchain, deriving what terms are most entropically useful to distinguish groups of posts from one another. Part of what would be useful here would be some sort of meta-analysis of the terms which Truffle Pig have derived over the last six months and whether they have become more similar or less similar to one another.
As an intellectual exercise, there is some amusement to be had. As something directly rewarding?
I'm not trying to be seen as a good witness, I don't care if anyone sees me as a good member of the community, I don't have anything to prove, I don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars invested in the blockchain (and if I did, after the last collapse, I wouldn't anymore) – I just don't have a dog in that hunt.
If anyone wanted to appeal to me to be more engaged, they would have to play on my vanity, my ego, or pay me.
Still, that's no excuse to let bad analysis go by without comment. I just don't like to see things done poorly. It's a compulsion, it's irrational, and I'm working on it, but not today.
Honestly? Two reasons. Firstly, SteamData went away and I really don't enjoy working with SQL. Secondly, I'm not sure it's a useful piece of information for us to make sense of anything going on.
Like I said, as long as the number of bot accounts on the steem blockchain is increasing more than proportionally to the number of accounts which are "active" on the blockchain, churn rates decrease. It's not an indicator which is useful for communicating what we want to know.
And step one involves determining exactly what we want to know before we go in looking for signals. We have to be aware of what we're looking for.
Additionally, what we're looking for has to be in the form of a question and we have to be ready to accept any answer that falls out. A lot of your analysis lately has started with a question from which only one type of answer is going to be acceptable – boosting the steem blockchain as an investment platform. Which is somewhat disappointing, because historically you have done a fair amount of analysis which has returned negative indicators. But since this latest contraction (which seems to correlate with you having become invested as a witness as well), there seems to be a lot of internal pressure on you to hype the blockchain.
That doesn't lead to excellent analysis.
If you go looking for positive indicators and throw away indicators that aren't positive, you will inevitably find positive indicators. They may not be indicating anything real, but you will find them.
So let's start from the top. What is it that we really want to know?
I would suggest that an important question is, "is content creation on the steem blockchain by non-bot creators increasing or decreasing?" A good secondary question might be, "is the content becoming more monocultural/mono-subject or more diverse?"
"Churn" isn't going to be a useful metric. Instead, if we really want to know whether the value of the blockchain is increasing or decreasing in a real sense (as opposed to its worth), we have to look at the reason that it's a useful platform – and that is the presence or absence of content.
The guy that does @trufflepig would be good to have here, because that system does regular analysis of the content on the blockchain, deriving what terms are most entropically useful to distinguish groups of posts from one another. Part of what would be useful here would be some sort of meta-analysis of the terms which Truffle Pig have derived over the last six months and whether they have become more similar or less similar to one another.
If we are actually interested in these questions.
What are we actually interested in?
for someone that doesn't know if he is interested in the questions, you sure have a lot to say
Oh, like that's a surprise.
As an intellectual exercise, there is some amusement to be had. As something directly rewarding?
I'm not trying to be seen as a good witness, I don't care if anyone sees me as a good member of the community, I don't have anything to prove, I don't have hundreds or thousands of dollars invested in the blockchain (and if I did, after the last collapse, I wouldn't anymore) – I just don't have a dog in that hunt.
If anyone wanted to appeal to me to be more engaged, they would have to play on my vanity, my ego, or pay me.
Still, that's no excuse to let bad analysis go by without comment. I just don't like to see things done poorly. It's a compulsion, it's irrational, and I'm working on it, but not today.