Three years of SteemSTEM - a window on our curation effort!

in #steemstem5 years ago

The SteemSTEM project was officially launched on September 29, in 2016 (although a small group of STEM lovers on Steem were already discussing about it for some time). Making us 3 years old - one of the oldest projects on Steem that's still alive!

Happy anniversary SteemSTEM!


Science communication is a vital force worldwide, and there is a clear potential for Steem to play a role in this context.

SteemSTEM focuses on this goal via several actions that range from supportinig STEM authors (both on Steem and on other social media like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Reddit), the development of our frontend, the deployment of our witness @stem.witness, and the organisation of meetups in crazy places (the first two happened at CERN and at Virgo Labs).

We'd like to share with you all a few statistics about curation, engagement and user retention over the last 3 years to commemorate the hard work that our whole community of volunteers and authors have put in to our cause.


Curation

Authors are supported according to various criteria. First, objective requirements ensure that any supported post is related to Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics (STEM), and that it is not fraudulent or dishonest (references image credits, plagiarism). In addition, we also encourage content creators to use enthusiasm, humour, natural tone, simplified language - generally have a social media personality that may best reach larger audiences. Wikipedia-style posts are not what we are about!

We also stress that there is no length requirements, and that we accept content in Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

There are currently four levels of SteemSTEM support:

  • 10%: To encourage a new user or acknowledge effort.
  • 30%: An average vote for an average post that does not report anything new or exciting, or that is not written with any personality or passion.
  • 65%: Very good posts with character in their writing style and/or that bring unique or fascinating content to Steem. We feel content of this calibre contains information that users might search for in the future from outside of Steem.
  • 100%: The best of the best, often written by authors who master and have a unique approach to their subject, that is completely original, groundbreaking, and/or demonstrates one's own research.

Since the beginning of the project, we have supported 3062 authors who have written 21327 posts. As a plot is better than 1000 words, take a look:

This describes the number of weekly supported posts (green) and unique authors (blue), as well as the usage of our weekly available voting power (red). Ignoring the HF-related spikes and dips, as well as the crypto bubble of January 2018, it is nice to see that HF21-22 generated a revival of the community (the last data points).

Let’s cross our fingers the current trend will continue!

Diving deeper, we can break down the amount of supported posts in posts receiving a small-level (less than 20% upvote), medium-level (less than 65% upvote) and high-level (more than 65% upvote) amount of support.

Our goal is clearly to have a larger red area. However, this kind of posts requires more effort that, naturally, many are not willing to put the effort in at current reward rates. This should somehow be accounted for as we have a thriving voting trail so that our best posts easily get several dozens of SBDs of rewards!

In terms of rewards, let’s close this section with the breakdown over time of the $685,793.248 of rewards that we have shared with more than 3000 Steem users.

Even today the numbers are not bad. The posts supported by SteemSTEM get all together about 1000-1500 SBD weekly (please check the last data points).


Engagement and user retention

The interesting feature is that on average, user engagement measured as the average number of comments over the supported posts has barely changed since the beginning of the project.

Whilst we have>a lot of posts with not that many comments, we however have a good number of post with more than 15-20 comments. We hope to do better there, thanks to our efforts reaching out to other social media and a future option that will allow people to comment posts without any Steem account.

For the spike at 62, please see here!

On a different aspect, the figure below displays the number of weeks between the last and first posts of all authors supported during the last 3 months (green) and 6 months (green + blue).

A sad conclusion is that many users write one post and leave (the peak at 0). This is a common theme across the whole blockchain and its various projects.

We however have many community members who are there for some time, contributing to SteemSTEM on a regular basis. Our oldest users (who are here for more than 2 years and who have written at least a post during the last 3 months are:


The steemstem.io app

It is finally cool to see our app being used more and more (and hopefully, with all the planned developments, this will continue rising):

On this curve, we consider all posts supported by SteemSTEM and posted from the app.

As our last words for today, we wish to thank all the supporters, benefactors, curators, trailers and fantastic members of the SteemSTEM community for everything they have contributed that has allowed us to continue doing what we do, evolve, and become better than ever before!

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How beautiful! <3 It feels wonderful to be part of this community family. I am so grateful for SteemSTEM, for all the support and encouragement I have received over the years, all the kindness, but above all for all the incredible people I got to meet and think of as my virtual friends.

SteemSTEM has truly become part of my life. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY!! Weeee :D

That is true: SteemSTEM is now more a family that a community, stricto sensu :)

PS: we should definitely meet at some point ^^

we should definitely meet at some point ^^

Definitely! ☺️

I am extremely grateful to be mentioned here in this wrapup post. I am also very grateful for your continued support. Y’all put in a lot of great work and showcase many amazing authors. Thank you ! Looking forward to one day making it to a meet up :)

For that, we may need to organise a meetup first :)

It's an honour to be among the oldest members of this amazing family.
Right from the days of Steem chat till now, the journey has been amazing. I remember when we won the firepower contest and how we worked together as an indomitable force.

Happy anniversary SteemSTEM

Hey we're in the same age category! Nice =D

Also, dat 70 rep =D

I am the old fellow here ;)

Yeah, way way old :D

We have to respect gradpa @lemouth Sammi. We must always respect the elderly 😏

Says the girl who is older than me IRL... OK this was an easy one ;)

😂 😂 😂 Bummer! I should have thought this one through! :P <3

You could have expected it, couldn't you? :D

In this part of the world, we'll call him "baba" to show respect 😂😂

Baba lemouth it is Sammi! Also, it sounds lovely :)

Exactly. Baba lemouth sounds cool 😂😂

It's Baba lemouth. Abbey got it :D

Baba @lemouth lol.... It a showing respect in Nigeria lol..... Means the elderly.

@lemouth's Steemit Anniversay Photo

@lemouth.png

Almost me ;)

Yeah, same age 😂😂. We've come a long way 😎

Great to have you there. I was suspicious about some of the names that would finish in this category, but four of them actually surprised me :)

It's an honour. Y'all have been amazing. SteemSTEM can only get better.

PS: where's the anniversary party holding? :D

Well... here? :D

Congratulations to SteemSTEM for these 3 years boosting the scientific content in blockchain. It is admirable the work of its administrators, curators and honors members and of course to congratulate each person who contributes their grain of sand to this project by creating high quality content (without them steemstem would not exist) are the cornerstone of this great project that has been in steem since its inception and as time goes by continues to grow little by little.

Great @lemouth statistics and congratulations for your great work.

HUrra SteemSTEM

Congratulations to everyone! This would not have been achievable without the efforts of many :)

Happy Birthday. Best thing on the blockchain :)

Subjectiv....no, you're right. =)

Definitely not subjective, in the same way I am not biased with this comment... :D

I wonder if creating some kind of sponsorship program for new people that show promise, would help retain them longer? By sponsorship i mean that the new user gets to pist on his sponsors feed, but a portion of the author reward goes to the sponsor in exchange for the access to their followers.
I think one of the major issues is just how overwhelming the raw feed can be, and it's not all that easy to filter it. At most you can search by the tags, but since the 5 tag limit, many ppl use only the popular tags, so that's not very accurate. But not sure if i see that changing anytime soon.

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We actually have a team of honour members who plays this role. When we notice a new user, we are trying to send him/her to our discord and put him/her in contact with the honour members who could guide him/her. It works well when this is used, but users are not that demanding for such a service.

For the filtering, we are mainly using our own app. I have ideas on how to develop a full curation platform on it, but mostly no time to implement that because it is a subsequent piece of development, and I do that during my free times. I hope this will help us discovering new users :)

Finally, we also hope our activities on Facebook, Reddit and cie will help. The future is bright, IMO, but we move slowly due to the fact that the most active of us are overwhelmed. I guess this is the fate of any Steem project, somehow :)

Discord works, but i feel like if you have issues getting ppl to just sign up on steem, it doubles the chance to loose them if they also have to sign up for another thing. I know that's just where things are at right now, but i hope one day all the apps link together, and have messages built in. Then they don't have to jump through so many hoops to get fully on board.

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I also ave the development of a "sign-up made easy" page on the app, and also allowing people to comment without having an account (like steempress does). This yields the same problem as before: my time is very (very very very) limited, I am not a JS dev (I learned it because I needed to, to develop the app) and I am thus not super fast.

However, I prefer doing things slowly and right than hastily and wrongly.

PS: also, finding a dev working for free (or the beauty of the project) is not an option (we already tried that).

Yeah at least in the context of STEM subjects, steemstem.io has all the filters in place, just click the subject you want at the top. The issue is getting people on there without habitually getting involved in Steemit.com which is still the go-to starter place.

Well i might have to try it out, as i'm mostly using steemit, and Partiko.

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For daily use I'd just transfer your energy to steempeak, far more intuitive and beautiful interface. For Stem, use ours since you get extra strong votes just by using it =)

Hey, well done family!!, how old am i here, i think i joined December 2017 . All the same i say kudos to all senior friends in the house. Well done @lemouth, the post is finally out.

Am grateful for all support that i have ever received so far from @steemstem and for always encouraging quality work Will write soon again

We are looking forward to your return! We will hold the fort as we have always done until there :)

The stats, by the way, are beautiful =)

Thanks!

10 lines of python for all but the retention one, 10 extra line of python for the retention one. Compact and efficient.... plus 3 days to browse the blockchain and harvest the information :D

Great work! Happy to be a part since the earlier days. I have a few lengthy, well researched and informative pieces on electron microscopy I am working on. Have not been dedicating much time to writing lately, but you should see something soonish.

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I was actually surprised when I found out the date of the first of your posts we supported. I thought you joined us much more recently. I was actually wrong :)

Congratulations... Keep going...

No plan on stopping!

The same holds for you: please keep going in writing so nice articles on architecture :)

Thank you.. Obviously I will write and spread the words here...

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