A Steemit Census Results

eroche (68)in #community • 8 years ago (edited)

Responses came from all over the Graphene World. Thank you for all those who contributed and supported this initiative. It is about sharing information for the benefit of the community.

I aim to present a complete picture of the Steemit World.

Where is Steemit used?

As the responses came in I got some helpful suggestions, so on top of the survey results, I have layered in several sources of data to produce a map of users as it stands in April/May 2017. I have also included additional information form Google Trends and Reporters without Borders to provide some context to my analysis.

I have been very encouraged by the participation and insights from this first Census and I will run it again periodically to provide a picture of how Steemit is developing. I welcome feedback on how the format and information collected can be improved.

What is The Steemit Census?

Most countries that are interested in looking out for their citizens take a census every few years to take a snapshot of what the living and social conditions are at a point in time. A Census serves two basic purposes:

It gives valuable information to the powers that be of what resources are needed and where. It provides data to help them plan for the future.
It also provides a record for future generations who can look back and see (over time) how their native land has evolved.

@lovejoy described it

The beauty of a public blockchain like Steem, and to me one of the most profound features, is being able to freely share information with each other. On Facebook and its ilk, as we all know... they have all the data, and the users are left in the dark. (Insert panopticon reference here)
On Steem, we have the capacity to be truly, voluntarily informed, and engaged with one another, and we're just beginning to coalesce the tools necessary to fully grasp such a state of being... in action. ;)
Exciting times!

The Census Results

I have collated the responses to the Census into a table at the bottom of this post. I got responses from 14 countries and 4 areas in the US. I did not get feedback from all over the world but it is still interesting to see the perception from Steemit users that responded. Particularly in relation to Celebs and Whales. Where do all these whales live???

Need for Multiple Sources

I got some very helpful suggestions in the original Census post and I have expanded the scope of this Report to fill in some of the blanks. The following analysis is based on the User Profiles but I provide a comparison to the Census results.

User Profiles

This only represents a snapshot of users on Steemit. There are hundreds of accounts being registered each day, and in total there are 158 thousand accounts registered. By examining the distribution of profiles where a user has supplied their location an image begins to emerge of the geographical spread of the user accounts.

There are 3,201 user profiles with a location specified and the following map and table shows the breakdown of the locations.

Wiseguys include people from the Moon, Nirvana and one poor soul Lost in Latin America. I am sure I am missing some profiles at the moment, as my search algorithm needs some fine tuning, but I will refine it and run this graphic periodically.

Please consider including your country in your profile tag. Other users in your area may have more confidence in the platform if they feel that it's trusted by people in their country.

It would encourage more people to join Steemit.

Insight

Comparison to the Census Results

Some of the results from the analysis may seem surprising.

Profile Locations

I was expecting to see more users from Ukraine based on the Census
Ukrainian users must not be as willing to show their location in their profile. I only counted 15 but there are 100+ according to the Census.
I am sure that a lot of the Wiseguys are from America. I need to refine my search algorithm!!!

Responses Latin America and Asia

Language
My Census post was only in English. There are a lot of users from different regions who may not speak English. I will reach out for the next census for translations.

For these reasons combing data from different sources will help to build a better picture of the community.

There is some interesting detailed analysis based on webtraffic data provided by @gavvet.
There are other crowd-sourced websites such as http://steemwho.com/ by @mikehere and http://www.steemspot.com/ by @originate which may provide additional location based data.

Google Trends

What's going on in Slovenia and Ireland?

Google Trends lets you explore search terms over periods and it charts it by region. It's interesting to keep an eye on this from time to time and over the last 7 days this is the results across the world.

Trend over last 7 days

Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=steemit

Freedom of the Press

The following graph from Reporters without borders puts Steemit adoption into context and will influence how willing people are to participate in a Census here on Steemit. It's no surprise that the most open people about where they live will be from the US, Canada and Europe.

Source: https://rsf.org/en/ranking?utm_content=buffer10fd8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bufferapp.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Conclusion

Each day there are many new users signing up from all over the world. The growth of interest in Crypto from Japan and South Korea is likely to lead to a flood of new users here on Steemit and as Bitcoin and Ethereum applications become more main stream across the globe I have no doubt that Steemit will be quickly discovered and help to educate these new Crypto users.

The Next Census

I plan on repeating the Steemit Census to collect more data which would benefit the community, at a later date.

For future iterations let me know what would be useful to collect. Would you like to know what people work at? What age profile?.... I am not sure what kind of responses we would get but we can give it a try if you have a reasonable suggestion. It might also help to build in a survey with steem-poll by @good-karma, if we can get enough people to participate.

The First Steemit Census Results

Country	City/State	Active	Whales	Celebs
Canada		10-50	NA	NA
Czech Republic		0-10	0	0
Estonia		0-10	NA	NA
France		10-50	NA	0
Germany		100+	1	NA
Iran		0-10	NA	NA
Ireland		10-50	0	0
Italy		10-50	NA	NA
Japan		10-50	0	0
Nigeria		10-50	NA	NA
Portugal		0-10	NA	NA
Taiwan		0-10	0	0
Ukraine		100+	NA	NA
US	Minnesota	10-50	1	0
US	Michigan	10-50	NA	NA
US	Texas	0-10	0	2
US	Mid	0-10	NA	NA

Source: https://steemit.com/community/@eroche/a-steemit-census

If this is the first time your seeing this post and you don't feel the numbers reflect your experience please comment below and I will update the table accordingly.

What is a Celeb and a Whale?

I was asked in the original post "What's the definition of Celeb and Whale?"
I wanted to keep this vague for the first Census to take the temperature of the responses. I didn't want people to feel like there was a specific criteria. This could lead to people not participating in case it reflected badly on their profiles. There was no wrong answer, the Census is a crowd sourcing initiative and if we get multiple observations of a particular data point we can combine the results. This should lead to a better prediction.

Over time I plan on introducing a more specific criteria, which will be important to standardise the results as Steemit grows but the precise criteria is fluid at the moment.