I have been analyzing top posts by number of views from the last week, when I noticed something peculiar.
Do you see it?
There are several posts on the leaderboard with funny looking identifiers. So I went to investigate, and after visiting the posts in question, I found out they were all in Korean. The reason why the identifiers look malformed is because the slugify algorithm that is used by steemit is filtering out all non-ASCII characters (while Korean characters are probably UTF-8).
This sparked my curiosity further. I wanted to know how many different languages are being used on Steemit, and implicitly (albeit not accurately), how many national communities do we have here.
Results
I've collected all the posts from the last 7 days (only posts with votes and comments were included), and ran their contents trough Google's language detection algorithm. Here are the results.
It looks like Korean speaking community is the second largest on Steemit, with 5.2% 'market-share'. Followed by Spanish, German, Indonesian, Croatian and Polish.
Homework for the curious reader:
Try to find out how many people in the world speak these languages, and re-normalize the percentages accordingly.
Thanks
I have also noticed we have several 'ambassadors' who are collaborating with whales and otherwise supporting the growth on non-English communities. Thank you for your dedicated efforts, and I hope more people will take the initiative like you did, to make Steemit a truly globalized system.
I love this post, it shows that our work involving @cervantes in the last 10 months is been contributing to the growth of the spanish community. Hopefully in a couple of months when steemit really goes viral, the spanish content will be bigger than english and we all enjoy the party :-)
Thanks for putting this together. There has definitely been a concerted effort by certain whales/orcas to help foster and grow these other communities, which really makes a lot of sense for the overall growth of the platform.
Definitely yes. I will post how Korean community has grown and is growing. It has several different stages so I believe my experiences on KR community provide some insights.
look forward to that. I've always been curious about how non-English group can grow on steem, esp. regarding the necessary conditions recognized for this growth.
I am looking forward to reading that @clayop! I really want to help spread the word to others - not even in another language - but I would like know about any tips that help invite and onboard others.
Absolutely. I am so impressed with the quality of people we have in some of these regional communities. They are spending 10x the time and effort that I am in promoting Steemit in their countries, sharing it with new people, bringing in fresh new original content, filtering out spam and stopping abuse, and getting everyone excited about what Steem and Steemit offer. They are building engaging communities that will continue to lead Steemit's growth. Looking forward to continuing to support their efforts.
Wow, there are so much koreans? Much more than Germans I really surprised that the community percentage of English is such huge.
That's so interesting! I remember a few months back, in the earlier stages of steemit, German was the 2nd largest community after english.
The korean community has truly arrived in the crypto world!
I've also seen a lot of introduceyourself posts from new members in Indonesia, so I expect that percentage to grow even further.
Great statistics, thanks for compiling and sharing them!
How are you accessing the view counts in bulk like this ? I thought that part was stored on a steemit internal db and not accessible except manually by loading each post. I would LOVE a regular view of the highest viewed posts of the day/week to help make sure rewards go to people bringing views not just big vote trails..
The view count is pretty inconvenient to get. I only sampled a small size of posts (the ones with 100+ votes) for 7 days. I might add the view count to SteemData in the future.
Yes, please do. I have been waiting for something that shows views. In fact, I would LOVE a tab next to hot and trending that says views. It would be important information to see whether the people bringing over the most views to Steemit are only earning 25 cents or something low! If that were the case, I would search out these posts and support them. Do we really want someone with a huge following to show earning less than $1 to the thousands of viewers they may get?
A little bit ago I did a post that had over 4000 views, but only over 100 votes and earned $8. I'm not complaining, and at least $8 didn't look terrible. But I've been on here for a long time now so at least I get regular voters but a newcomer with a massive following outside of Steemit may not get many Steemit votes for a long time if they go unnoticed.
Thanks so much for looking into adding this feature to SteemData.
Aah okay, yes please if you get time that would be awesome
In an effort to develop normalized numbers, I was able to track down some rough estimates using people's primary language.
World Population - 7.5 billion
English speakers worldwide - 1.5 billion or 20%
Korean speakers worldwide - 77.2 million or 1%
Spanish speakers worldwide - 472 million or 6.3%
German speakers worldwide - 95 million or 1.3%
Indonesia speakers worldwide - 43 million or 0.57%
Croatian speakers worldwide - 5.6 million or 0.07%
Polish speakers worldwide - 39 million or 0.5%
Using the numbers provided in the post, I divided by the percentage of the world that speaks that as their primary language to get a normalized number. This is the result.
Korean - 5.2
English - 4.4
Croatian - 4.0
German - 1.5
Indonesia - 1.3
Spanish - 0.4
Polish - 0.4
Steemit in Croatia is huge. Thank you for a normalized number.
Conclusion - A number above 1 indicates that those languages are well represented on Steemit. A number below 1 indicates those languages are not well represented on Steemit. From these results it look like there is a good number of Korean speakers in the Steemit community and a low percentage of Spanish speakers. Interesting.
Normalized numbers, that keep motivating us, spanish native speakers, due to huge growth potential
I love to see stats like these.<3
Yes brother I see here in the platform of many languages
The Korean language and German are also many in the past
This is a wonderful community for the whole world and for all languages
post of @mys (first on your list) was listed on frontpage of polish clone of reddit, wykop.pl, here
You can still vote for it, I think he deserved great reward for bringing so many view of Steemit :)
https://steemit.com/litecoin/@mys/remember-this-210-ltc-worth-puzzle-posted-by-charlie-lee-we-have-solved-it-detail-explanation-inside-how-we-did-that
This is hilarious! 13k views so far! I am impressed because that is my first post on steemit :)
Are Chinese censored from participating here? I could easily see them take a 20% "marketshare".
Good point. I'm also surprised that chinese isn't listed at all, given that the "cn" hashtag has been on the trending page continuously for ages.
This is such good news and a great reminder of our cosmopolitan inclusivity! Thanks a bunch for sharing, namaste :)
What is the best strategy for those writing in several languages? English-speaking followers probably won't be enthusiastic about seeing posts in other languages in their feed too often.
Speak for yourself, if I can puzzle a tiny bit out of the other languages I'm familiar with and it looks interesting, I'll go through the effort of translating myself- but as others point out, a translate button would make this effort trivial. Comment not meant to dis you, just to disagree.
I am not speaking about translation. I wonder how to write in several languages without disturbing followers with it. Two accounts?
My point- I would certainly read your English post, and MIGHT try to read other-language posts- I certainly wouldn't be disturbed by it. Anyone who might should jump in here, your solution of two accounts would certainly eliminate any complaint, but I think (and this is opinion with absolutely no data) you might see a little less interaction overall.
I love Korean BBQ. Please, Koreans reading this, invite me to your BBQ's.
Thanks @furion perhaps the solution might be a Steemit like golos or yoyow for each language
No, esperanto is the solution ! :-)
Nos esperantamos no es el solucion? Soy de atistas caul esparantos estas Navidad
Mi komprenas nenion. Eĉ tradukante vian mesaĝon per google translate.
I liked your post, very informative. Who is getting more benefited is seen here. One thing whales got to work on to promote the new ones that just joined or the ones struggling to stick at there level. So far I have seen that when the market is up all want to post their ideas and concerns. As soon as the market fall a little all panic an start running away.
interesting, I am surprised French is not in your list
I use google translate.
Vere interesting vidi la evoluon de tio afero. Estas spegulo de tutmonda socio, kiu strebas al komuna lingvo.
The adoption of Steemit by non-English speaking people is pretty awesome. I've noticed a lot of Korean posts doing well, I've also seen some Spanish and German posts within the last few days. It's cool to see how everything niches out and that people can make Steem$ regardless of most of the base being English speakers. It makes me wonder how what we can do to increase the amount of bilingual people on the platform. It would give us a great perspective on all kinds of content.
Agreed
Vere interesting vidi la evoluon de tio afero. Estas spegulo de tutmonda socio, kiu strebas al komuna lingvo.
Thanks @furion - Do you know how Steemit plans to handle different languages in the future? Are we going to get a filter or something? I love the many languages but it doesn't help me to see a post in Korean in my feed (at least not most of the time). :)
And how do you pull all of that data out of the system? That's interesting.
When it comes to Croatian language, it's same as Serbian. Actually it is Serbian language. In Serbia we use both Cyrillic and Latin letter. It's usually happens that for example Google offer me translation for my language as it so called Croatian, just because it's on Latin letter. Same is for all people on Balkan that has Serbian ancestors.
Very interesting. I didn't know that.
Heavy bullshit. Extremely similar languages - yes. Same - no. And no - Croats don't have serbian ancestors...that's just some more of world famous serbian propaganda all over again.
As for Google language tool - that's correct - it doesn't really recognize subtle differences. It often offers me suggestion that something is in "bosnian" when it's in croatian and vice versa. Same goes with serbian... So ,results here are definitively misleading.
They sound similar because it's same language, but different dialect. Serbs in Bosnia, Belgrade and Montenegro speaks the same language, but with different dialect.
Yes, Croats, at least 85% of them have Serbian ancestors. That is visible on almost every step in their country, but pressure of Catholic Church was brutal and many Serbs were forced to declare themselves as Croats. So, basically they were told to my people: ,,From now on you are Croat, you speak Croatian language and you are Catholic".
Thanks for the stats. It's interesting to see too many Koreans are here and they have great voting power. Turkish Steemit community is slightly new but we are coming to take the 3rd spot! Right now Turkish users have not too many voting power but user base is growing day by day.
excelente publicacion muy interesante felicidades :)
Ja wirklich ein sehr gelungener Artikel. Auch ich beglückwünsche den Autor dazu. :-)
pambihira naman.. bkit kasakit nang intindyan nyan...
yes i've noticed this as well ,but i can't see a translation button anywhere, do they have one.
I noticed that too! There are so many Korean posts on Steemit which are really successful! How trending is Steemit in Korea??
Thanks for sharing this great analyzation, @furion!
My daily work to have a larger italian community is vain. :)
I made a tutorial website in italian and translated the steemcenter wiki to italian, but still the italian community is soooo small!
Anyone have any idea why French isn't on this list? The number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions including the polyglots, and well over 100 million of exclusive speakers.
Then I noticed others had mentioned this repeatedly, and I hadn't picked up that Chinese wasn't on the list, either- time to read marcusxman's blog about it.
Slowly slowly other language users will also start using steemit & this chart will change for sure !!!!
providing useful and interesting information.. Great post !!
nice....you deserve resteem and upvote...
I am stoked about this. My foreign language is bad but if there is anything I can do to help. Just let me know. One of the most amazing thoughts I had when I joined steem was seeing posts pay out and thinking some dude from another country is making 50x what everyone else is in their country just from posting on here. And that was a thought I liked! A middle finger to borders, and banks, and Fiat money. And ya like someone mentioned above, a translate button would be a great thing to have in the future for steemit as the use base continues to become more diverse!
I agree, and my French, German, and Russian are all terrible these days, but better than they were 20 years ago when I was NEVER using them- simple exposure motivates me to practice a little bit, and our Google Translate overlords may be oppressive, they DO work properly to some degree...
Good research @furion, many question arising from the absence of China in the list and I get the feeling that China will probably not be on the list for sometime but I hope to be proven wrong. I wrote on the possible reason why in my post, I'm not looking for votes, but take a look at what I wrote here and see if you concur.
Interesting information! I know there are also several people working towards getting a Portuguese/Brazilian community going. French and Japanese are interestingly "absent."
My Indian friends on Facebook are becoming interested. People in very poor countries who may only have a phone that takes photos could really find an opportunity here to escape poverty.
Awesome post, I see this one going to the moon.
So the Koreans ruling Steemit?
Steemit going world wide !!!
good post - upvote + follow ;)
Nice to see the love for steemit grow
Wow, good news..
Awesome..
Thanks for sharing information..
Dear friend furion
I have been asking for special tags for the languages so all the speakers could find themselves easier
Its happening !!
Nice analysis
yeah, I'm personally going to work on helping steemit spread into Venezuela. Lord knows they could use a better currency.
Great analysis .. was just talking and introducing steemit to my friend in Indonesia. He jumped on steemit straight away .. the adoption of steemit is growing at an extremely fast pace. It's so exciting being in something which will change how social media will be like next
Thanks for sharing! Good to watch the international growth. Followed
graphs, charts + stats = thank you!!!! Love!!!
Pretty neat! I have used Google Translate when someone used a different language to leave a comment on one of my posts. Awesome community and growing!
thanks for the effort. Korean's are crazy about crypto
I'm trying to get my Cuban friends to join. Not easy explaining steemit though in my broken Spanish