Abstract
Since their introduction, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have transformed the way people interact with each other. Lately, a new trend is rising in the development of OSNs, fueled by an increasing interest of the blockchain technology and the benefits it can bring to the world of OSNs. Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSMs) are Social Media applications that are supported by the blockchain technology. Thanks to a blockchain, BOSMs either try to enforce the privacy of the users or try to redistribute with their users the economic wealth generated by the platform through a rewarding system. There are countless BOSMs available which incorporate a rewarding system. Among them, Steemit can be considered the most well-known platform exceeding 1 million registered users. Steemit is supported by the blockchain Steem, which is a blockchain that natively supports the development of social applications by the usage of transactions that model social activity. Even if other important blockchains, such as Ethereum has been widely analysed, at the best of our knowledge, no study exists concerning the topology of the transactions graph of Steem. The main goal of this paper is to study the structure of the Steem transaction graph to understand its characteristics and unveil crucial knowledge concerning their users. More in detail, we build the Interactions Graph and, after its study, we evaluate three subgraphs that capture its social and monetary aspects. The degree distributions of the graphs follow a power-law. Additionally, we detect a substantial number of bots that offer paid services on the platform among the most active users. Lastly, the investigation of the four analysed graphs through a bow-tie structure, suggesting that half of the users have a passive social behaviour and that 80% of the users tend to accrue economic value.
Highlights
P EOPLE use Online Social Networks (OSNs) to share their personal information, as a daily activity
Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) [19] are Online Social Networks implemented by exploiting decentralized networks, such as P2P networks, that provide the decentralization of social services
The account rmp have similar contents. In this list we find a number of accounts with different interests and purposes, such as jerrybanfield, a youtuber, a-0-0 and papa-pepper, interested in flowers and gardening, slowwalker, an historian, adsactly is a user that creates a large number of posts concerning literature, arts and blockchains, acidyo, which is a person that manually curates posts of Steemit, always1success is an account that, on Steemit, daily publishes a short list of accounts that produce high quality contents for Steemit, and lastly cheetah is a bot account that, when invoked by other users, checks for potential plagiarism on posts published on Steemit
Summary
P EOPLE use Online Social Networks (OSNs) to share their personal information, as a daily activity. The lack of success of DOSNs, and the increasing problems concerning OSNs, such as fake news or data disclosure, has been the primary motivation to combine social platforms with the blockchain technology. Several Blockchain Online Social Media (BOSMs) have been proposed, motivated by the need to give value to the content generated by the users. With more than 1 million users is the most used BOSM It is based on the Steem blockchain, which differs from other well-known blockchains, such as Ethereum and Bitcoin, for its social nature, but in particular for its performances. Our analysis shows that the majority of the users has a strong interest in the social side of the blockchain This happens mainly because Steemit introduces a rewarding system that offers economic rewards to some social actions, performed by users, and their impact. A comparison and discussion concerning the identified structure is presented in Section VIII, and Section IX concludes the paper, pointing out possible future works
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