Steem - Post Payouts & Steem Health Part 2
More important than the number of accounts or daily activity, I would propose that the wider the distribution of posting rewards is the key metric we should be tracking to show the health and sustainability of this great platform.
How can we examine the health of Steem over time?
Image Source: pixabay.com
In this post I analyse how many individual accounts make up 90% of the post reward payouts per day for the period October to December 2017. The wider the distribution of rewards the smaller this statistic will become
Post Payouts by Value
We start by examining the daily post payouts for the three month period October to December. The colour shows what authors make up 90% of the daily payees (by value).
- Note the increase in payouts in December as a result of the Steem Price rise.
Post Payouts by Number
An almost reverse picture emerges if we look at the daily payouts by number. This second graph shows, for the same data and split as in the first graph, the count of unique accounts that received this 90% of daily payouts by value.
- This is actually smaller than I was expecting but it is still significant.
Post Payouts by Number (Split)
This is the same graph as the last one but it's easier to see the numbers and growth.
- As we get more users you may expect both these figures to grow.
What is most important here is what proportion of daily posters get the 90% share.
We want to see this figure come down over time.
Accounts that get 90% of Daily Post Rewards
If we divide the number of accounts that get the 90% share by the total accounts that post in a day we get the following graph.
- The proportion is dropping so effectively the number of accounts that get 90% of the rewards a day is dropping.
- Over this period the proportion dropped by about 3%.
- This metric will be one to watch over time.
Related Posts
I am taking a deep dive into the Accounts and Activity of Users in this series of posts. The plan is to produce a series of regular reports based on the outcome of this series. Please let me know what you think in the comments.
You may also be interest in:
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-post-payouts-and-steem-health
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-comment-data-and-automated-accounts
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-post-data-and-automated-accounts
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-network-growth
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-distribution-of-posting-rewards-by-account
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-distribution-of-posts-by-account
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-account-activity
- https://steemit.com/stats/@eroche/steem-geographical-distribution-of-accounts
Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Travel and lots of random topics.
So I understand that a shrinking group are getting most of the rewards. That is not good for Steemit. I see the same few people getting hundreds of dollars for any old post (or sometimes comments) they write due to their own SP or that of other accounts they control (or from their friends). The trending page may actually discourage new users as they won't see a chance of making anything like that. I have hopes that as Steemit grows things will improve, but it may continue to get worse for a while.
I agree that this isn't great, but it's also a reality for every content platform (YouTube, Reddit, Quora, etc). It's the 80/20 principle in action.
What do you think can be done to prevent this? It's a very difficult problem to solve.
In this case it's more about influence than popularity. Maybe that influence will shrink a bit as steemit grows
All that is inpossible, but sometime possible
Nice post!
In the current steemit, the contents and rewards of the article are not properly evaluated. This is the greatest evil in the expansion of steemit.
by the way...I drew your portrait.
I will be happy if you see it.(^^)
https://steemit.com/japanese/@skyleap/i-drew-eroche-portrait
The proportion of posters getting 90% of the rewards is not really that bad. I don't like the downwards trend, but it's likely due to a surge in new users going on recently.
The downward trend I am showing represents the proportion of people getting 90% of the daily rewards. This metric reducing implies that the daily reward is being distributed to a larger proportion of people. I think this is a good for the health of Steem and Steemit.
Surely it's the opposite? If 90% of the rewards are going to a smaller percent, it is a smaller proportion of the network getting almost all the rewards.
Ill edit to make the heading more clear.
Effectively the number of accounts that get 90% of the rewards is dropping.
We've got our wires crossed somehow. I'm still not seeing how that's a good thing.
We did get our wires crossed. I think your way of looking at this is better.
It will all be about perspective but this metric dropping will mean fewer people are getting more of the rewards which is not a good health indicator for Steem.
Although it's fewer proportionally, while the userbase has been surging. The absolute numbers are looking good, the money is going to more people. Hopefully the proportional numbers will balance out again when we are outside of such a surge.
you are trying really hard to study about steemit statistics!
It helps many steemians :)
Thank you for your all the effort!
Awesome analysis, though What I witnessed so far is that the people who've bucks to buy up votes are successful, here on steemit, even if their posts are one liners only :) yet looking forward for things to be much improved in near future. Dolphins like @eroche are much needed on Steemit to put some balance as a matter of fact.
Great analysis as always @eroche. My concern is people are too quick to chastise those that are getting the whale's share of the rewards. How many of them have invested their time and money into the platform? I see them as working harder and most importantly, smarter than most. Indeed there is some gaming of the system that that can be looked at as unhealthy, but if the witnesses and rules allow it then isn't it smart to pursue it with your time and money? If you disagree with people making $$ on comments, which I do, then let the witnesses know. Remove your votes from the one's that support that and vote for one's who don't.
As you know I work hard with SteemitBC, but I probably don't work as smart as I need to, therefore we haven't been rewarded as handsomely as I had hoped. It means I have to work smarter.
I grew up thinking the successful were the enemy, that they were stealing from everyone else. Indeed some are, but the majority work hard and work smart. We should encourage the entrepreneurs in all of us to strive to be in that upper echelon. Work hard, work smart, be successful.
I completely agree with your points and I have been surprised by how many people share this view on this platform.
The one thing I would add though is if you take a step back and ignore the rewards completely, I think the platform will gain more momentum and be healthier with more diverse content. One crude way to measure this is by how many people are posting, but this is really hard to get at (bots multiple accounts etc) but I think by looking at groupings and how the groupings of these people are changing over time we can get some insights. I am testing different metrics and cuts of the data to arrive at useful metrics which people will be able to refer to for reliable information on the platform.
I have looked at a few aspects in the last few weeks but there are many more we can use. For example in the working smarter aspect, it would be interesting to look at how networked people are. I'll be doing some analysis of the discord groups, Twitter posts etc to see if there is anything there that we can look at to inform smarter networking.
So 18% of users get 90% of the rewards. Sounds like something that we know about the fiat currency, "1% of the people own the 99% of money"
So technically we've made good progress by rewarding 17% more people in Steem world.
Hopefully this will change in coming days when more and more dolphins are created/made.
Thanks for your analysis.
Source on that? I think you're confusing it with this, but it's 1% owns 50% of the wealth, not 99%.
Steem is empirically worse in terms of wealth distribution than the wider world right now, the benefit is that the protocol encourages wider distribution over time, whereas it's the opposite in the fiat world today.
Yeah, you're right. Probably it got adulterated as it traveled all across the Internet.
For Steemians with low SP, this certainly isn't a good data to see 18% people rake in 90% of the moolah 😁😂
It is unrealistic to expect much wider distribution than that at any given time. Even the whitepaper predicted this:
I'd also keep in mind that it's not 18% of people, it's 18% of active accounts. A huge number of those active accounts are voting bots which are bringing in very little rewards.
Just came across this, thought of sharing with you: https://thewire.in/216160/richest-1-cornered-73-wealth-generated-india-2017-oxfam-survey/
Good point. It's very positive that not all the rewards are getting given to a tiny group of people.
I looked some time back at the distribution of account values compared to this 1% figure. It's not quite as high at the rest of the world but it's still quite high. It's not trivial to get this stat though because some people own multiple accounts and we don't know who exactly these people are, especially for some of the big accounts.
True. Multiple accounts and cross voting from one account to another is common. Though to draw money or shift Steem outta Steemit, just one account (the primary one) is used (my limited observation)
At the same time, people make multiple accounts and keep one of them accounts just for upvoting minnows and plankton (again my limited observation over the last 87 days)
I have myself been beneficiary of receiving massive upvotes from such accounts on 4-5 occasions.
i think steemit inc should come up with new measure to distribute the reward pool more evenly, a large percentage of the reward pool distribution is still concentrated in the accounts of just few authors.
There have been many proposals and they did tweak it last year a bit. Would more users solve the problem? I think the way to tackle this is to scale up the user base. We will get more diverse content and more posts and voting patterns.
I agree completely that Steemit would be healthier if more users had a slice of the 90% cake. Do your posts on this issue carry any weight with the devs?
Nice post
You can also vote me if you find my post interesting