Steem - Comment Data and Automated Accounts

Is it possible to use the posting activity of comments to isolate which accounts are bots?

My last post, in this deep dive into account activity, focused on Posting data. We got some insights into what posting activity looked like for the last 3 months of 2017, and we also got a feel for what the mix of automated posting and manual posting was.
There were less automated posts than I was expecting but I am sure this is something we will see grow over time and is one to watch. I suspected that most of the automated posts are being generated on comments so today I will take a look at the breakdown of these.

Image Source: pixabay.com

In this post I am going to focus my analysis on Comments (excluding Posts) to see what trends emerge.

Distribution of Posting Frequency

If we slice the data by month and look at the distributions of posting activity by account we get the following boxplot.

The pink rectangles show that the majority of accounts Comment 30 or less comments per month. (i.e. about 1 a day)
The blue shaded region is where some accounts make up to 8 comments per day.
8 comments per day was my average during this period. I know people that are much more active than me but I will use this as a benchmark.

So how many times did the most active accounts comment?

Posts Oct - Dec

This graph shows the distribution of number of posts from the 100 most active individual accounts over this period.

Around 45 accounts post more than 5,000 times in this period.
There is no surprises in the top few, with the exception of @steemitboard who has posted more than 200k times in this 3 month period. There are obviously a lot of people making achievements.

If there is one, what is the number of comments a day that we could use to identify automated accounts?

I would propose anything higher than 15 comments per day (on average) uses some sort of automation. This is almost twice the rate that I posted at during the period so it's an indicator for some sort of automated commenting. This number may not be correct but it's a starting point for our analysis.

Using this criteria (15 comments per day on average) I next look at the splits of posts per day between automated and manual. Automated Comments have posted more than 450 times in a month. This produces a list of 1,175 accounts that regularly post more than 15 times a day.

Comments Per Day

This next series of graphs shows the split of number of comments per day based on this criteria to identify manual and automated comments.

Number of Comments

automated > 15 posts per day (on average)
(From 1,175 Accounts)
manual everything else

Number of Comments

The last graph shows the total post count and the visual the split but we can also plot the individual components separately to identify trends.

I was expecting to see a growth in Automate Comments over the period but this has been relatively flat and we see an positive increase in manual posting activity. This is very encouraging!

Have you come across any interesting ways to gauge the amount of users on Steemit or Steem?

With this series I am analysing trends in the Steemit Account Activity to see what the most useful metrics are for identifying growth and activity on the platform. I have come across some interesting trends in the data which I hope to analyse regularly and which the community may find useful. There are a few more items I will look at in the coming days related to accounts but please let me know if there is anything in particular you would like to see. Thanks for reading.

I am taking a deep dive into the Accounts of Users in this series of posts. You may also be interest in:

Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, Travel and lots of random topics.