Organized information campaign regarding Steemit?
Today I decided to look into Google news feed and see if Steemit had been mentioned recently. To my surprise, there were several articles about the platform. This was unexpected, so I wanted to look into it.
The first article is called Steemit is not out of steam: How the SocialFi app still powers crypto adoption in Africa. The main message in the article is that Africans can find income on Steemit that can help them in their difficult economic conditions. Overall, it's a pretty clear topic that's impossible to disagree with. But an attentive reader might notice that something is wrong here.
The authors of the article provide the following interesting statistics:
Steemit claims it has now crossed over 1 million users, and that 14.4% of them, as of June 2025, are Nigerians. Around the world, 63.8% of its users are from emerging economies like Indonesia, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Thailand.
I was curious where they got this analysis from, as I had been trying to do something similar for a long time. It wasn't difficult to verify the information, as the text contained a link to the source. The source turned out to be one of the reports from the curation teams. The authors of the article took a chart showing the countries covered by the curation team and presented it as some kind of statistic about the origin of the authors. This is nothing more than consciously presenting wishful thinking as reality.
The "journalists" went further. In order to interest readers and create an image that you can make a lot of money on Steemit, they provided the following statistics:
For example, Joseph (@ josepha), a Nigerian Steemit user who was active 6 hours ago, has earned $7,214.42 overtime; $165.72 in the last month, and $35.26 in the last week.
Ruth Joe (@ ruthjoe), another influential user, has earned $4,076.75, while Ngoenyi (@ ngoenyi), another influencer with 2,286 followers, has made over $12,500 in lifetime rewards.
It seems the data is taken from steemworld.org.
I probably wouldn't have noticed this article if I hadn't immediately come across the second one: SteemIt, an Early Blockchain Social Media Platform, Claims Over 14% of its User Base is Nigerian. And again the same chart from the same report.
It seems like a planned information campaign aimed at attracting more new African users. But what is the goal? Is it a selfless dissemination of useful information with the aim of helping people, or is there something more pragmatic at play?
lol
Sourced to steem.com.
So they start with an obsolete number that was probably published when STEEM was around $3 or $4 or more - in 2017 I guess. Then they rephrase "paid out to users since June" (this includes authors, voters, witnesses, and SP holders, probably over multiple months) into "to creators in June 2025 alone".
This made me curious, though. If we estimate 93K rewards per day at $0.15, about 30,225 of that goes to authors (not counting burning) - $4,534 per day/$138K per month/$1.7 million per year.
As a sanity check, we could estimate market cap at $75 million and interest at 6% and we get about $4,000 per day going to creators.
So, they're overstating it by a factor of about
13K-15KCorrection: ~430-490. (I accidentally compared days against months before the correction.)0.00 SBD,
10.47 STEEM,
10.47 SP
It's good that you've figured this out, it's very interesting. I also noticed that the figure for the rewards paid is extremely high, but due to lack of time, I didn't go into the calculations to check it.
I wanted to know this number for a long time 😁. Even with the current bad market conditions, Steemit still rewards content creators significantly. The task of the curators is to distribute these rewards wisely.
0.00 SBD,
0.23 STEEM,
0.23 SP
... and so information with a truth content of almost zero spreads and at some point the AI has learnt it. By then at the latest, it will be true for anyone who doesn't think and research for themselves.
I don't think there is a goal. It's just bad journalism!
0.00 SBD,
3.32 STEEM,
3.32 SP
Really. I didn't even think about it. Google already offers answers to search queries generated directly by AI. It's hard to imagine how many people take them as the absolute truth.
Maybe. If Steemit had some kind of referral program, then the purpose of such posts would be clear. I wonder if there are people selling "How to make money on Steemit" courses? 😄
0.00 SBD,
0.44 STEEM,
0.44 SP
Probably many. I come across it more and more often in everyday life that someone says they asked the AI and it said this or that... and it was often wrong.
0.00 SBD,
0.26 STEEM,
0.26 SP
My my
Although the fact that you can make a lot of money on Steem is often emphasized, it's not far from the truth. Many Nigerians have managed to accumulate a good amount of Steem over the past five years; unfortunately, many of them have completely shut down their accounts.
There have always been a good number of users from Nigeria and Indonesia.
0.00 SBD,
0.45 STEEM,
0.45 SP
This is true. In general, you can see that the worse the economic situation in a country, the more authors from that country are on Steemit. People are looking for ways to feed their families.
0.00 SBD,
0.10 STEEM,
0.10 SP