Steemit's adoption in non English speaking world
I have been analyzing top posts by number of views from the last week, when I noticed something peculiar.
Do you see it?
There are several posts on the leaderboard with funny looking identifiers. So I went to investigate, and after visiting the posts in question, I found out they were all in Korean. The reason why the identifiers look malformed is because the slugify algorithm that is used by steemit is filtering out all non-ASCII characters (while Korean characters are probably UTF-8).
This sparked my curiosity further. I wanted to know how many different languages are being used on Steemit, and implicitly (albeit not accurately), how many national communities do we have here.
Results
I've collected all the posts from the last 7 days (only posts with votes and comments were included), and ran their contents trough Google's language detection algorithm. Here are the results.
It looks like Korean speaking community is the second largest on Steemit, with 5.2% 'market-share'. Followed by Spanish, German, Indonesian, Croatian and Polish.
Homework for the curious reader:
Try to find out how many people in the world speak these languages, and re-normalize the percentages accordingly.
Thanks
I have also noticed we have several 'ambassadors' who are collaborating with whales and otherwise supporting the growth on non-English communities. Thank you for your dedicated efforts, and I hope more people will take the initiative like you did, to make Steemit a truly globalized system.
I love this post, it shows that our work involving @cervantes in the last 10 months is been contributing to the growth of the spanish community. Hopefully in a couple of months when steemit really goes viral, the spanish content will be bigger than english and we all enjoy the party :-)
Thanks for putting this together. There has definitely been a concerted effort by certain whales/orcas to help foster and grow these other communities, which really makes a lot of sense for the overall growth of the platform.
Definitely yes. I will post how Korean community has grown and is growing. It has several different stages so I believe my experiences on KR community provide some insights.
look forward to that. I've always been curious about how non-English group can grow on steem, esp. regarding the necessary conditions recognized for this growth.
I am looking forward to reading that @clayop! I really want to help spread the word to others - not even in another language - but I would like know about any tips that help invite and onboard others.
Absolutely. I am so impressed with the quality of people we have in some of these regional communities. They are spending 10x the time and effort that I am in promoting Steemit in their countries, sharing it with new people, bringing in fresh new original content, filtering out spam and stopping abuse, and getting everyone excited about what Steem and Steemit offer. They are building engaging communities that will continue to lead Steemit's growth. Looking forward to continuing to support their efforts.
Wow, there are so much koreans? Much more than Germans I really surprised that the community percentage of English is such huge.
That's so interesting! I remember a few months back, in the earlier stages of steemit, German was the 2nd largest community after english.
The korean community has truly arrived in the crypto world!
I've also seen a lot of introduceyourself posts from new members in Indonesia, so I expect that percentage to grow even further.
Great statistics, thanks for compiling and sharing them!
In an effort to develop normalized numbers, I was able to track down some rough estimates using people's primary language.
World Population - 7.5 billion
English speakers worldwide - 1.5 billion or 20%
Korean speakers worldwide - 77.2 million or 1%
Spanish speakers worldwide - 472 million or 6.3%
German speakers worldwide - 95 million or 1.3%
Indonesia speakers worldwide - 43 million or 0.57%
Croatian speakers worldwide - 5.6 million or 0.07%
Polish speakers worldwide - 39 million or 0.5%
Using the numbers provided in the post, I divided by the percentage of the world that speaks that as their primary language to get a normalized number. This is the result.
Korean - 5.2
English - 4.4
Croatian - 4.0
German - 1.5
Indonesia - 1.3
Spanish - 0.4
Polish - 0.4
Steemit in Croatia is huge. Thank you for a normalized number.
Conclusion - A number above 1 indicates that those languages are well represented on Steemit. A number below 1 indicates those languages are not well represented on Steemit. From these results it look like there is a good number of Korean speakers in the Steemit community and a low percentage of Spanish speakers. Interesting.
Normalized numbers, that keep motivating us, spanish native speakers, due to huge growth potential
I love to see stats like these.<3
Yes brother I see here in the platform of many languages
The Korean language and German are also many in the past
This is a wonderful community for the whole world and for all languages
post of @mys (first on your list) was listed on frontpage of polish clone of reddit, wykop.pl, here
You can still vote for it, I think he deserved great reward for bringing so many view of Steemit :)
https://steemit.com/litecoin/@mys/remember-this-210-ltc-worth-puzzle-posted-by-charlie-lee-we-have-solved-it-detail-explanation-inside-how-we-did-that
This is hilarious! 13k views so far! I am impressed because that is my first post on steemit :)
Are Chinese censored from participating here? I could easily see them take a 20% "marketshare".
Good point. I'm also surprised that chinese isn't listed at all, given that the "cn" hashtag has been on the trending page continuously for ages.
This is such good news and a great reminder of our cosmopolitan inclusivity! Thanks a bunch for sharing, namaste :)