The number of active users on Steem is in decline. Let's talk about how to fix that.
Here is the data on active users (shoutout to @rushd for them):
2016-07-28 6464
2016-07-29 5617
2016-07-30 4398
2016-07-31 4095
2016-08-01 4349
2016-08-02 4439
2016-08-03 4313
2016-08-04 4254
The decline in price of Steem isn't worrying to me in the slightest, I've been in bitcoin long enough to know how to ride out a bear market.
However a decline in active users definitely is worrying.
These figures should act as a wake up call to the Devs... Clearly something is putting people off coming back to the site.
In my opinion, that's that the rewards aren't configured optimally...
My suggestion to the devs is to adjust the way rewards works so that they are slightly more evenly spread...
Clearly, we will still need the big value posts which are such an eye-grabber and do attract people to the site, but spending time on and publishing quality content which gets a significant amount of upvotes, but only earns 10 cents (because only minnows upvoted it) is, I believe, putting people off returning to post more content at the moment.
I suggest that there be a minimum reward guarantee... if your post gets 30 upvotes, you'd get a minimum 50 cents. 50 votes and you get a dollar.
Obviously that's just a suggestion, and I'm sure others will have their own ideas about the level of minimum reward which makes sense. There are probably significant flaws in my idea (one obvious one is that it might be too easy to game the system with Bots), but something clearly needs to change, so let's have a discussion...