Here is the news

This is already the second #FollowFriday of 2020. I was wondering what the mood of the #Steem community is as we start this year. Could this be when things take off? Looking at sites like Hypestat it looks like the Steemit site lost a lot of ground, but I find their numbers incomplete and it may not have lost many visitors over the year. It just has not gained much ground. The Steem price is less than half what it was a year ago, but other coins have seen similar drops. The crypto market in general has not seen big gains. Bitcoin is up on the year, but well below the all-time high.

@stateofthedapps has some interesting numbers as it measures blockchain activity rather than web visitors. This is useful as we have various 'dapps' that would not show up otherwise.

Stats

@splinterlands is seeing some solid growth. Steemit is also showing an upward trend over the last month. @partiko still has a lot of users despite lack of development. I am mostly using @steempeak and @esteemapp. Between all these we seem to have about 10,000 active users, but that will include a lot of bot accounts.

Follow-worthy folk

Here are some Steemians to check out:

@alnhart is an artist who just joined Steem.
@danaidhbee also joined recently. He is a cool guitarist from Scotland.
@resurgencefilms is a filmmaker from Australia who just started posting again.
Shoutouts to my Steem friends @slobberchops @bozz @verhp11 @detlev @revisesociology. All worth checking out.

The doghouse

As part of my contributions to the @steemflagrewards anti-abuse efforts I see a lot of crap around Steem. There is a set of accounts @andyson @orion7 @georgia14 who just buy votes, sometimes for each other, and do not engage with anyone. Some of their content may be plagiarised. They do not even check the images are relevant to the post or check their spelling. hey are using Likwid so they can free up Steem to buy more votes rather than powering it up.

Junk

I have been accused by someone I will not name of 'STEEM POWER MISUSE' (their caps) because I delegate to various people. I am actually reviewing my delegations right now. These are some of my main delegations:

@tenkminnows is by far the largest. That account auto-votes for selected small accounts. I have no immediate intention of powering down what it has earned from curation.
I support @steemflagrewards with delegation. I got some votes from that account, but it is not a major part of my Steem income and it compensates for the flags I get in retaliation. I get SFR tokens for downvoting abuse, but I use those to buy votes for deserving posts by other people.
@antiabuse is not downvoting much these days and so I will take back that delegation.
@matildamoment is a family account that is just supporting @tenkminnows for now.
@giftgiver gives out delegations to small accounts. I help increase their votes.
@chops.support is another account helping people grow run by @slobberchops.
I will drop @steem-ua as it has little value to me.
@marenontherun is a runner I have helped to become a minnow. As she is there now I will drop the delegation.
@rabbitbot is another account that downvotes abuse.
@noblebot would warn people if their keys were compromised and also did some downvoting. It has been deactivated for now, so I will remove the delegation.

I am adjusting some others and may add new delegations. One I did get paid for is @isotonic which sold votes and supported runners, but it looks like it is only being used by some junk accounts so I have removed my delegation and will support @runningproject instead as that is voting up posts by runners.