After having an extended holiday (and thus less time on Steem!) I have started to settle back in and have noticed some of my favorite Steemians have either left, or have become very inactive. Some of them are very good writers/content creators and it has been sad to see them move on from Steem. After doing some more reading it seems that there are some common themes as to why people leave this platform we call Steem.

Rewards (or Lack of)

I bring this up first because it seems to be one of the things that alot of the newer accounts seem to struggle with and leads many to go off in search of greener pastures. I myself have found that it can be frustrating to produce quality content only for it to earn a few cents or dollars at best, while some others can manager to earn loads producing crappy content.

The big shift in mindset (for me) has been that earning Steem is a long term ‘investment’. So this mean that what you earn today could be worth a lot more in the future. Imagine in the future if Steem is worth $5, $10, $50 or even $100? Now the small amount of Steem we hold could become very valuable!

Lack of engagement

This is another factor I have had to fight with from time to time - I have over 1000 followers now, but when I create a post I am lucky to get a handful of upvotes and/or comments. This can be rather disheartening, as this is suppose to be a ‘social network’. It is also alot more encouraging to write posts when I know that there are actually people reading what I am writing.

I find that the more you put into Steem the more you get out - this means if you want to engage with your posts then you need to go out and engage with others. Why should we expect people to read and engage with our posts if we don’t do the same on their posts? I am slowly starting to join back in discussions on Discord and steem.chat again and these are also great places to get to know new people and increase engagement.

A system ripe for manipulation

This is a sad fact that a system like Steem is ripe for manipulation and it sometimes really sours the experience for users (including myself!). The argument over upvote bots has been l=ongoing and I have sat on both sides of the fence, but I don’t agree with people using them to promote crap to trending! The increasing amount of bots they are useless isn’t helping with the user experience either.

The balance with a decentralised system like Steem can be hard to figure out. Freedom of speech and expression is one of the keys on here, but along with that comes people who want to abuse their stake. Yes there has been a few flag wars - I have seen some people get involved in discussions with Steemians and had their accounts flagged to the ground. It seems we leave the majority of the power in the hands of a few, and while lots of people on here do good things, some abuse their power.

Conclusion

Although Steem continues to attract many new users, there is still a problem with account retention, as many people leave for many different reasons, some of which I have outlined above.

I hope that those who produce quality content can see past the shortcomings of Steem and buckle up for the long term - I think we are in for great things in the future. Remember Steem is still in its infancy, and the problems are still being ironed out.

I would love your thoughts and comments as always!