I actually spend a lot of time just looking at the charts and comparing historical trends.

There are a few little things I find interesting. Public interest in Steem hasn't even managed to match the first Bitcoin bubble back in 2011. Bitcoin reached an enormous market cap of... $23 million. Steem has barely ever been that low in its lifetime, even when it was struggling.

At the same time, Steem transactions per day are already three times what Bitcoin is today. If you exclude 98% of transactions and only compare the most directly comparable transactions, transfers, Steem reached a peak of around 28,000 in 24 hours. It took three and a half years for Bitcoin to reach that milestone, and only three other blockchains are doing more than that (Litecoin just recently beat it and is doing more transactions again than Steem is doing transfers, for the last couple of weeks). Steem is beating almost every blockchain out there by this metric, including most of the billion dollar coins. By raw transaction count it's beating everything hands down.

Steemit is currently the most active Bitcoin forum, measured by new posts about Bitcoin (I measured this with manual sampling and filtering, larger samples would be better though). More posts are created about Bitcoin here per day than on reddit.com/r/bitcoin, reddit.com/r/btc or bitcointalk.org. It's likely that all the combined Bitcoin subreddits have more new posts than Steemit, but that's still impressive. Bitcointalk does have more traffic than Steemit.com, but it's not that far ahead, Steemit is growing far faster and is already ahead in the most important market: USA.

There are several geographic regions where interest in Steem is growing much faster than interest in Bitcoin ever did (In Venezuela, current interest in Steemit matches the levels of interest in the 2013 Bitcoin bubble).