Saving The Steem Blockchain: What We Can Do To Improve User Retention

How many users are on the steemit platform? This is a difficult question that might seem easy to answer instantly. The number of users or customers a platform or company has contributed immensely to the platform’s or company’s success. The more active users a platform has, the greater success the platform have in all aspects.

Steemit has over one million users and from the lame man’s point of view, that’s actually a lot. But the question that needs to be answered is, how many ACTIVE USERS are on the platform. It is not enough to just get people to start using your platform, they also need to continue using it in other to ensure the success of such a platform.

Discoveries have shown that the loyalty of consumers increases the company’s revenue by 20% to 95%. Also, up to 80% of the company’s income in the future is gotten from 20% of the currently active users. You can see for yourself that the future of platforms such as this is dependent on the number of active users it has.

Based on recent statistics from the post of users like @arcange and @penguinpablo, the steemit community is rapidly losing this key factor (active users) that will guarantee its future and success.

The user graph above was created by @arcange and as you can see, there are over 1 million steemit accounts but the number of active users is not even up to half the number of users.

Also, check out this active user graph created by @arcange. From the graph, you can see that there was a rapid increase in the number of active users in the early parts of this year. This was as a result of the Steem price being around 5-8 USD and you can see the great effect it had on increasing active users. You can also notice that the number of active users has been going down ever since.

If you are familiar with the user levels put together by the @steemitboard based on the stake an account has on the platform, here is a chart that tells a lot.

Do you notice the huge number of accounts on the fish skeleton level? Steemit has less than 1.5 million users but up to 1 million of them are DEAD! This is over 80% users that are dead and which have almost no interest or stake in the platform.

So why are people leaving Steemit?

Here are some of my predictions as to why the steemit community is rapidly losing its users. I will also write some possible solutions to the problems which I think might be the cause of the rapid decrease in active users.

Reduction of Steem price

There has been a rapid decrease in the price of steem since the first half of this year. Steem price has reduced by more than 5 times and this alone has had negative impacts on the motivation of many users.

How can this be solved? I'm not someone who knows a lot about cryptocurrencies and stuff, but I strongly believe that if we do our bit in general contribution, writing posts, promotion, and curation, it will definitely have a role to play in increasing steem price.

The Huge Focus on “Quality”

Are we looking for a successful STEEM or do we want “quality”

Personally, I would love both. Unfortunately, we cannot have both. Having a successful STEEM with the amount of focus we are putting on quality is an impossibility statistically. Having this idea that STEEM is a platform only “quality” posts is one of the reasons STEEM is not having enough active users.

For instance, WordPress which is the largest blogging platform has over 75M Sites on it. Reddit also has over 500M accounts and active accounts are above 250M. That’s about 250M people posting stuff, commenting, upvoting and so on. If the STEEM community where to have such statistics, it alone is able to rapidly increase STEEM price.

Now do you think everybody posting and commenting on these platforms are posting just “quality” stuff?
The answer is NO! Just as you are going to see a lot of quality posts on such platforms, you are also going to see some crappy posts.

Having this “quality” type of mentality is exclusive and arrogant. We are faced with the problem of users becoming inactive. While we can attribute this to a lot of other factors, it could be partly caused by the huge focus we are having on “quality”. It is either “You have to post quality content” or someone saying “I’m posting quality content but I’m not being upvoted” These two ideas alone can make an average user become de-motivated.

The thing is: people do not post QUALITY and that is one reason why STEEM does not appeal to them.

Do you know what most people post? They post only things that INTEREST them. Some peoples interest might be on dog videos, selfies, some even find interest in filming a ladies butt. These are the things they want to post. They do not care about quality. After all, that’s just what the internet is; a large group of people with different interests.

Does this mean that people posting quality content or people looking for quality posts should drop or reduce their standards? Definitely not.
What it means is that people should be free to post whatever it is that interest them. They should not be under any obligation to maintain or adhere to anyone's standard on “quality”

Some people have this idea or mentality that people will only upvote quality contents. This might be true to some extent but the fact is people do not upvote a post because of just “quality”. There are numerous reasons why people are going to upvote a particular post. It could just be because they like it for whatever reason or that they are close to the author and these factors and many others like it are not based on quality.

The main goal is to have a blockchain that is successful with millions and even billions of users and I don’t see this achievable if everyone is putting this huge emphasis on “quality”

The STEEM Environment Is Very Complicated

For a first time user, I think the Steemit system is complicated and complex. Being a person that had a very good knowledge of technology, I also had a hard time getting to understand and know stuff about the environment. And for one to be able to take full advantage of all the community has to offer, it is very essential to get to know the environment.

If there are enough educational articles being published by people who know a thing or two about the environment, I think this problem can be solved. It could make it easier for new users to navigate through the system.

Also, the Steemit “welcome” menu has a lot of information to offer but the content found in the menu is broad and someone might get confused while trying to go through it. It would be better and easier if this information could be given through a chatbot.

Steem Password Can’t Be Recovered

People who have lost their steemit password one way or the other have totally lost their accounts because there is no way for the password to be recovered. This has caused a lot of accounts to become inactive.

Creating a way through which users can take advantage of to recover their password would be very helpful. Phone numbers, email information, and so many other methods can be used to recover the password of users.

Many People Leave The Community After Their First Few Posts

Most people joining Steemit get discouraged after their first few posts and become inactive. This is because their first few posts did not gain recognition. Those who received positive response in terms of upvotes on their first few posts have a high tendency of sticking to the platform. So if we can upvote post under the #introduceyourself tag which is very nice, we can motivate new users and make them stay.

CONCLUSION

The Steemit community has been losing a large number of users for a while now and many accounts are becoming inactive. From my point of view, I strongly believe that if we can check these possible problems and work towards implementing and looking for more ways to solve them, we can salvage the STEEM blockchain.

Thanks for reading. I hope this was helpful.

Image source:shonellerton.com