In case you may find this interesting...
Beckstroms's Law measures the value of the network. Rod Beckstrom was the CEO of the ICANN and among his achievements was more decentralized internet. He now has a consulting company where they consult and advise startups, organizations, etc about the network economics. They can be reached at beckstrom.com. Not sure how much they charge, but I think Steem and Steemit could use some expert evaluation and consultation.
Here is the presentation on the Beckstrom's Law by Rod Beckstrom himself.
There are many models used in attempts to calculate the value of a network. Some simple like metcalfe's law and others with varying complexity. They all have something in common. They all have some form of exponential growth with respect to the number of active nodes (users). The best model is one that is fit to the growth-value after the network has experienced growth. Of course, we can't see into the future to get the best fit model. If you can't afford to pay for the consulting, you can find a professor at a college and I bet that they could get a student to perform an evaluation as a Ph.D. Research Project.
In the presentation above, Rod Beckstorm also talks about Metcalfe's law and his reasoning why it actually doesn't work in practice. For example, every connected node doesn't necessarily represent a user. In one household you may have 4 computers connected to the network, but it may be only one user using them. At the same time, several users can be connecting from the same node. Etc.
Failure in a practical implementation of Metcalfe's law was actually what motivated Beckstrom to come up with his model.
Moreover, Beckstrom is an advocate for decentralized networks, and he puts forward interesting ideas and observations in his book on the topic, the Starfish and the Spider.
Beckstrom's law focuses on benefit/value & costs of each transaction for each participant, rather than nodes and users in the network.
For these reasons, I believe Beckstrom's law is a good fit for measuring the network value, retrieve useful data to improve network economics.
Metcalfe's "law" doesn't work as it is just an approximation for the number of connections when N is large. I recall reading that a better fit for large N is kN.logN, where k is a network-specific constant, thus slightly different for, say, FB and Reddit etc. The reason being that users tend to cluster into user-groups.
Thanks, will follow the links.
I did point out that it wasn't accurate.. I take it you were just driving that point?
The best law is the one that fits the actual growth after the growth has been accomplished. (i.e. hind sight is 20/20).
I wasn't replying to you, but to @geekgirl - sometimes can be confusing if replies are all indented yet at the same level.
However, just as Beckstrom has attempted, it is not enough to criticise the (ab)use of Metcalfe's idea, but to discover a more accurate metric.
Metcalfe's law also doesn't take into account for market saturation. (what happens when everyone is part of the network). It assumes that growth can go forever, but there is only a limited number of people in the world.
Metcalfe's law can be a good approximation provided that the network costs are low. For instance Facebook where they have very few employees compared to a typical company of their size.
The thing that will throw both laws out the window is that both assume price for goods/services remain constant. We don't have that here. A year ago the price topped out over $8 for STEEM. That STEEM was being used to cover operating costs of Steemit.com and Steemit Inc (i.e., being traded for goods and services). Now it is less than 40 cents. Our operating cost fluctuates with price of our currency. The problem with both laws is that you can't add a variable that accounts for price of STEEM as there is no way to predict the price of STEEM.