A Reference for the rest of us

@solominer recently published a poll, and it triggerd me to look at the Top 200 Hive stakeholders and their account statistics. The data is publicly available at HiveBuzz. I only took the Top 200 Stakeholders in terms of HP to create a bunch of visualization and analysis. This is only because I recently did some analysis of the top 200 SPS stakeholders for Splinterlands here.

I wanted to look at the Top 200 HP holders for another reason. These accounts are typically long term hive holders, and I wanted to see how are they rewarded as a blogger/content creator. One of the easiest thing to look at is their Reputation number. For those who doesn't know this, it is nothing to do with your 'reputation' in real life or even virtual life. It simply is a measure of how much upvote you have received over the years. So it is roughly propotional to your content production length (how long you are around) and/or amount (how many posts you have written). Higher the Rep number, more content you have produced and more upvote you have received.

Top 200 Held HP vs. Reputation

I plotted the Top 200 Held HP along the X-axis in log scale to spread the data out. The vertical axis is the Reputation, also log scale. Each account is a circle, but their size is proportion to the earned Author HP. For the new folks, when you earn hive rewards at payout, 50% of the rewards goes to Curators and 50% goes to the Authors. Interesting thing of note is a lot of the points stay along a straight line at Rep = 25. That is the starting hive reputation. These accounts are typically holding accounts and never posted any blog or even commented on anything, so they didn't receive any upcote. Therefore, their rep is at 25. The highest rep of hive authors are in the mid 80s (ignoring the hbd.funder account, which doesn't hold any HP, so not plotted here anyways).

Analysis of Social Classes at Hive

The Plot above can be subdivided into areas using a horizontal and a vertical line. The Green vertical line represents 500K HP. An account holding >500K HP is typically called a "whale" account, which means Upper Class or just "Rich". The ones below that 500K HP line, but above the lowest of the Top 200 HP, are called Orca. In fact Orca = 50K-500K HP. The lowest HP value is the top 200 is currently 93,525.

Yes, in future I will increase the size of the data.

The Yellow Horizontal like is approximately Reputation 65. Typically for most authors it is relatively easy to get to that reputation within a few months, if not a year of regular posting. Most of these Top 200 HP accounts are 4-7 year old accounts, so if the account is actively posting, likely it will be above 65. So, all the data points below this horizontal line are either INACTIVE, or Holding/Curation accounts. The ones above 65 are likely active accounts (generally speaking) or was active and stopped posting some time ago. I am calling them the Authors/Bloggers/Content Creators who stayed.

Four-Corners!

Based on these simple principles described above, the chart can be subdivided into four quadrants.

• Top Right = Wealthy Authors/Investors
• Top Left = Middle Class Authors
• Bottom Left = Middle Class Holders/Inactive accounts/also alt-accounts
• Bottom Right = Wealthy Holders/Curation accounts

It is obvious from this plot that the crowded space that requires further investigation is the Top Left quadrant. We will zoom into it.

This is the Middle Class Authors. The core content creator and bloggers of Hive. If you are a hive regular, you likely recognized a lot of these names. Here also you can see most of the popular authors are above 70 Reputation. Here I have made the circle size propotional to the author rewards. This gives us a general idea who is receiving most of the author rewards.

Are they Keeping it?

Above plot shows Held HP along the X-axis vs. Author rewards in the same quadrant. Basically is someone received 100K Hive author rewards, and their HP is 100K. At least they have kept the author rewards equivalent powered up. They likely have received some Curation rewards too. They may or may not have taken that out or invested in something else. That Yellow dashed line is the Author Reward = Held HP line. Below the line Authors at least have kept the Author Rewards. Above the line, they have sold more hive than they have received as Author rewards. The size of circle is proportional to the number of posts the author made.

Thankfully most of the Top 200 hive stakeholders fall below the yellow dashed line. I say this is a good sign, and a good thing to demonstrate to other similar ecosystem (say Splinterlands). Clear demostration that top authors mostly believe in the ecosystem long term, and they keep their hive powered up.

I expect the plot will look different in the Lower Middle Class and below. That will be the next post.