The immaturity of the Steemit community (a big part of which has a "crypto afficionado" background) can be seen in the statistics that @penguinpablo is publishing regularly.

Who are we?

Under the weight of emotion, people interactions with the blockchain track very closely ... the price of STEEM! There's hardly a rational explanation as to why would anyone read less, upvote and follow less, blog less when the price of STEEM decreases ... unless you admit that most people in the community are here with the "miner mentality" - "I do what it takes to earn STEEM in order to exchange it to fiat".

Therefore, when the price of STEEM is low, simple market mechanics means that the same amount of work is rewarded with less fiat. Thus some people tend to divert time and effort to more profitable endeavors.

On an aside note, this is rather dangerous for the eco-system - as less people produce content and upvote, there's less reason for other people to come to read the content produced.

This is all the more visible with the Utopian business model: @utopian-io supports open source projects. These projects post tasks, people from the community take them up and resolve them and Utopian rewards them with a vote (and sometimes with steem bounties on top of that).

But the programmers, graphic designers, translators who perform the tasks supported or published by Utopian have little attachement to the blogger and photographer community that Steemit addresses. They use STEEM as a currency which they then exchange for bitcoin and ultimately for fiat.

As the price of STEEM descends, the same amount of work thus earns them less dollars, or less euros or whatever other fiat currency they need to pay the bills. Understandably, they turn to better paid jobs.

This risks turning into a "death spiral". As tasks find less and less people willing to work on them, open source projects need to find some other arrangements for getting their things done. Less available tasks then naturally fuels the continuous drain of programmers and graphic designers from the platform.

Fortunately, as the friction is relatively low, those who have an account on the platform can easily come back when the price of STEEM recovers.

What about the Steemit core target: bloggers and photographers ? If this population had been massively present on the platform (as they should), then one would expect the fluctuations in the number of daily transactions to be much smaller, as people who blog and publish pictures were doing so more or less for free before Steemit came along, so they should be less sensitive to the variations in the price of STEEM.

The fact that they still make up a relatively small part of the community is one of our greatest failures. Yes, "our" because this blockchain actually belongs not to @ned and Steemit Inc. but to every holder of steem power (and more so to the witnesses, including @lux-witness).

Power to the bloggers

Here is to those who overcome their emotions and manage to do the rational thing to do: whenever the price of STEEM goes down, there's less competition for the STEEM that sits in the reward pool. If you have the possibility to not think in fiat terms but in STEEM terms, it is precisely when its fiat price is down that publishing and earning STEEM, SBD and Steem Power is both easier and more profitable. Less claims on the reward pool means more STEEM available for your articles ... provided you have the luxury of waiting patiently for the fear to dissipate and the price to recover.

_source

Warren Buffet might not understand (and therefore would not touch) crypto and the blockchain, but that doesn't make his insights any less powerful and true: "Be greedy when others are fearful. Be fearful when others are greedy" That is of course easier said than done (or else there would have been plenty of Warren Buffets around). But if you keep it in mind and think about it often, you can at least develop a healthy questioning routine:

is this a "greedy" moment? - I reckon back in early January 2018 the answer should have been "Yes!"
is this a "fearful" moment ? - similarly, the current moment looks pretty much imbued with a lot of fear ...

The best time to publish is now

Who are we?

Power to the bloggers

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