Two Years on Steem

Today is my two-year anniversary on Steem. Looking at the market right now, there is not much to celebrate (-7.4% in the last 24 hours, -20.9% in the last week and -73.1% since the last year). The bear market hit the whole crypto space hard, but in my opinion, it hit Steem much harder than some other projects.

I remember how excited I was, two years ago, when I signed up. I also remember, that last year I was cautiously optimistic, when I celebrated my first anniversary. To be honest, this year it is very difficult for my to stay optimistic. It is not only because of how much value Steem lost or how much Steem tanked compared to other crypto currencies (around one year ago it was ranked #45 on CoinMarketCap.com, this year it is #99 (I'm aware that you should take this numbers with a grain of salt, but the trend speaks for itself)), it is more because the Steem blockchain seems to lose its most valuable asset: its user-base.

According to stateofdapps.com, Steemit.com has 2239 daily active users, Partiko has 851, Busy has 468 and eSteem has 394. This makes for a total of 3953 daily active users. If you add some of the dApps, that use Steem, that number of course increases (although I guess it doesn't account for users using multiple front-ends/dapps), but the overall, disenchanting picture remains. Steem's sharp decline in value is certainly the main driver behind the low number of users, it also seems that measurements like Hardfork 21 didn't not counter this trend, but rather accelerate it.

When I signed up, there was talk about Steem(it) reaching mass adoption and back in the fall of 2017, it seemed, like this was possible (the grass is always much greener in a bull market). But to be honest, Steem being a social network kind of blockchain, also turns it into a kind of an echo chamber. If you just follow news about Steem on Steem, you'd get the impression that everything is fine and dandy, but not only does Steem have almost no exposure to the general public, it also does not have a great deal of exposure to the broader crypto audience (or why are most of the interesting crypto new announced on Reddit or on Medium).

It seems more and more likely that Steem will have the same fate as MySpace, almost 15 years ago: it was there, it was cool for a while, but ultimately it didn't last. If you are born after 1995 and probably have no idea what MySpace was/is, check out this video:

I'm sorry that my second anniversary on Steem isn't more positive, but at least let me end this post on a positive note: I'll stick around, because occasionally I need an outlet to share my thoughts with the world and despite the grim picture I just painted, Steem is still pretty good for that :)