A special report on the state of Steem comments: daily totals, comment to post ratio and interesting edge cases.

I have been wondering about low Steem comment payouts since I've added the rating of top comments to my daily reports. Today I've decided to look at historical trends.

Disclaimer

The data and visualization in this post may contain errors and inaccuracies. Don't make important decisions without verifying data yourself. If you have any suggestions or found an error in the data, please get in touch with me on steemit.chat.

Historical total payouts for comparison

• Price as a proxy total payouts is a leading indicator for number of comments and posts. Total activity decreases with price, no surprises there.

Historical comments payouts

• All time high daily comment payout of ~25,351 SBD was reached at 20th of July
• All time low daily comment payout of ~14.6 SBD was reached at 17th of October
• Note that @steemsports account is excluded from the comment totals
• Comment payouts dropped sharply, could that be explained by the general metrics decrease? No.

Percent of total payout

• All time high percentage of total payouts of %15.5 was reached at 20th of July
• All time low percentage of total payouts of %0.12 was reached at 17th of October
• Note that @steemsports account is excluded from the comment totals
• Relative comment payouts have dropped like a rock: ATH is 130 times higher than ATL, a difference of two orders of magnitude

Why @steemsports is excluded?

• Total comment payouts since 2016-10-01 for ALL comments excluding @steemsports: 966 SBD
• Total comment payouts of ONLY @steemsports: 910 SBD

Comment to post ratio

• Interestingly, the relative number of comments to posts hasn't changed significantly

Number of votes and average weight

• Average weight of votes(including minnows, dolphins and whales) on comment has moderately decreased
• Number of daily votes has significantly decreased from all time high (even taking into consideration the outliers)

Number of votes and average weight by whales

• Average weight of whale votes on comments decreases are similar to those of all marine fauna
• Number of daily upvotes has significantly decreased

My hypothesis

It is possible that the reason for the dramatic payout decrease of comments is proliferation of curation bots as main source of whale/dolphin votes and those curation bots don't target comments, only posts. As an example, my bots will only upvote posts.

Comment Payouts Are Dead and Why It's Important

Obvious reasons apply: Steem will not be able to function as a social network without an avenue for public feedback, encouragement or criticism. Whether teh community will evolve to comment without any expectation of payouts or number of comments will steadily decrease remains to be seen.