Steem - Post Data and Automated Accounts

A few days ago I looked at the number of Posts and Comments made by unique accounts in the last few months of 2017. The features of this distribution were quite clear, there were a lot of individual accounts posting small numbers of posts per day (on average). This analysis raised a question in my mind.

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

Image Source: pixabay.com

In this post I am going to focus my analysis on Posts (excluding comment) to see what trends emerge. I will follow up in the coming days with a similar analysis for Comments, where I would suspect a lot more bots and automated posting is going on.

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 posts 10 or less posts per month.
The blue shaded region is where some accounts make up to four posts per day.

So how many times did the most active accounts post?

Posts Oct - Dec

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

Around 75 accounts post more than 1,000 times in this period. These are outliers.
Clearly there are some automated accounts.

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

I would propose anything higher than 4 posts per day (on average) uses some sort of automation. It may be a regular update post, charts or some other automated post.

Using this criteria I next look at the splits of posts per day between automated and manual. Automated Posts have posted more than 120 times in a month. This produces a list of 736 accounts that regularly post more than 4 times a day.

Posts Per Day

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

Number of Posts (Ex Comments)

automated > 4 posts per day (on average)
manual everything else

Number of Posts (Ex Comments)

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

We can see there has been a significant increase in Automated Posts over the period.

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.