Less posts on steem

The more time passes on steem with the #newsteem movement, the fewer posts I encounter in my feed. I didn't know whether this was a purely subjective impression and I decided to make a little research.

After entering a couple of searches on google, I found the website Steemtool that shows the statistics of the number of posts and the number of authors during a selected time periode.

The number of posts on steem is continuously decreasing

When you look at the graph below, there are at least two clear tendencies that can be deducted. The number of posts written on steem is continuously decreasing over the last 6 monts. It seems that after the last hard fork, this tendency is even developping faster. At the same time, we can see that the number of authors is decreasing constantly as well. From another chart, we can notice the tendency that the average number of posts per author is following a similar tendency.

What are the reasons?

I think that making the hard fork responsible for those tendencies would be shortsighted. It is clear that the tendency started way before the hard fork. One reason behind it, is probably the price of steem which has followed a general donward curve. But I'm not shure whether the price can explain everything?

^{source: https://tool.steem.world/Post/Stat}

Why there are less posts on steem?

First of all, the average post per author has clearly diminuished after the hard fork. This is actually not a bad thing. Before a lot of people created bad quality content and then made them take value thanks to bid bots. I believe that because of #newsteem, a lot of such posts have disapeared. People tend to write less often and hopefully better stuff.

The price of steem has a very strong impact on the attitude of people. The lower the price, the less incentive to produce content. I believe that the price of steem is the single most important attribute to keep steem alive.

The price of steem is the big motivating factor for content production on the platform

The lower the price, the less content we have.

A big challenge is to keep small accounts on steem

People who hold bigger accounts actually don't have a choice. Since they are already heavily invested and since it takes a lot of time to get uninvested (power down), they don't have a choice but to stick with steem and make the best out of it. They will try many things but the chances are small that they will be lost to the platform.

This is not true for small accounts however. Their link to steem is much smaller and once they see that it is not worth to put all this effort in this platform, they will simply choose another one. Therefore it is very difficult to actually keep them on steem. For all the efforts that are produced for onboarding, there should be parallel efforts to keep people on steem once they started. Maybe a solution would be for bigger accounts to filter also small and new accounts and to curate them actively.

By @achim03

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