I'm actually not sharing this as a gripe. I still believe in Steem for the long term, and want to see it succeed, but there is a hard reality that needs to be dealt with, and improvement doesn't come by putting one's head in the sand. So, I'm sharing these graphs for future comparison against a snapshot of one aspect of where Steem stands today.
So here is the hard truth. From the vantage point of Google Trends, Steem looks like a dead product. Literally.
You've probably never heard of go90, but it was a mobile video-sharing platform that launched just half a year before Steem, with backing from a major US corporation. It never achieved the level of adoption that its sponsor had hoped for, so by late-2018, go90 was dead.
I have been watching this particular comparison for quite some time. Back in 2017, I thought it was encouraging for Steem. That reversed in 2018, though, and as-of yet, I see few signs of improvement during 2019. If we're setting targets for HF21, maybe our first goal would be to have Steem generate substantially more search interest than a dead social platform that never really took hold in the first place.
And while we're at it, how's this for a second goal?
I guess the good news is that there's not much room to go anywhere but up! So, hopefully this is a sort of low water mark. We'll have to check back later in the year to see what it looks like a few months after HF21.
Question: What other metrics do you think that the Steem community should be collecting for comparison before and after hard-fork 21? How do you think hard-fork success should be defined?
