New Users
I was planning to write an update on how user retention is going on Hive, but I think it's best to examine the major bottleneck Hive is experiencing before we even try to retain our users: having them join and become active in the first place.
All New Accounts
If we look for all new accounts created, this is what we see on a monthly basis above. The number is almost always around 3000 new accounts in a month, with an exception during the bull market of late 2021. If we look at the full lifetime, including the days of Steem, we can see that 3000 new accounts per month is equivalent to the worst days before the fork. In the Steem era, it only reached such lows a couple of times, where for Hive is it the norm outside of late 2021.
Users that become Active
Another way of looking at new users is to ask how many accounts actually became active. The following chart shows those who actually went on to make a transaction at some point after their account was first created.
Below is the same but including the Steem era.
An issue with this way of measuring is that the longer an account has been around, the more time it has to become active. This skews the data a little towards older accounts, although the vast majority of accounts which do become active do so in their first month.
Newly Active Social Media Users
Another approach is to look at only the accounts that become active on the social media side of Hive. Below we see the number of users who make a post within 30 days of their account being created. Note that for this purpose, November still has time to see more users who become active within 30 days.
As we can see, after hitting a near all time low in June, this figure somewhat recovered in late 2023. Also unlike the figure for all users, it is not so dramatically down from the peak. The vast majority of new accounts in 2021 either never became active or were used exclusively for games such as Splinterlands.
However by this measure Hive fares even worse in comparison with the days of Steem.
Conclusion
New user numbers have been chronically low on Hive at least since the fork from Steem. Even with DHF projects to onboard thousands of new users, we are not seeing meaningful results. And yet, as I plan to examine again in a future post, increasing the number of onboarded new users alone likely won't do much to improve the situation, not without also addressing our similarly chronic low retention issue at the same time.
So we don't see any impact from the Zealy campaign?
I'm not sure what that is, it would probably take digging into account creations by accounts to see if there is a particular impact from one source.
We saw a bump in newly active users between July and September, that primarily came from new Venezuelan users. However as I plan to show in my next post, the retention of these users was way lower than normal, and as a consequence any bump we experienced recently amounted to pretty much nothing in the end (there is no point in onboarding new users if retention isn't also improved or at the least kept to a normal level).
What are the issues onboarding and retaining people?
I was lucky when I first started 2 years ago that you delegated me some HP so I could do my first posts. Haha
For onboarding, I suspect the main contributors to the problem are
On retention, this is what I wrote last time someone asked:
https://peakd.com/hive-193084/@demotruk/re-rzc24-nftbbg-s3wly3
I think that's a great summary and I presume one solution is to have a custodian account sign up process like the wax wallets, but being decentralised, who would want to (and be trusted) to take on that headache.
I presume it should also be made easy to sign up to Hive from visiting anybody's blog, which isn't the case right now.
I guess we are likely to remain a niche community for the time being. I see even Nostr has the same issues with retention, although signing up/onboarding is very easy.
Perhaps there is something we can learn from them?
This was my previous suggestion. This model would require a hard fork to introduce a new transaction type, but the process of signing up itself could be greatly simplified.
https://peakd.com/hive/@demotruk/wouldnt-it-be-so-much-better-if-you-could-sign-up-for-a-hive-account-without-touching-any-keys
Perhaps the incentives aren't aligned properly.
How about stats concerning user retention and geolocation
I'm aiming to do that soon, but I do have lots of posts on those from weeks/months ago.
Posted via D.Buzz
It's definitely a problem. Over the last year I've struggled to find many new Brits on here. A few never provide real indication they are genuine and then give up anyway. I have seen a few businesses do some commercial posts that I assume are some form of SEO. I wonder who is encouraging that.
I'm telling you: It's the name Hive itself. It's terrible.
Hmm, I've always felt like guerrilla is the only way to onboard. Isn't OCD doing a good job at that, generally?
Yes, they are, but scaling that up is a major question. At the rate it is onboarding now users will have great-grandkids before we've reached even Steemit levels of adoption.
Hmm, hmm. So without going into details, what are fundamentals that could make on-boarding accelerate by itself?
Just wondering where your head is at.
The first hurdles we have are
We already know that even before we talk about user retention, the vast majority of people fall at these hurdles before even joining. Hive front ends are extremely obscure, people are not pushing their posts out to the general public to get views. We know from @lordbutterfly's ad campaign some years ago that ads for Hive got high click through rates, but they didn't result in many actual accounts being created, and we've no analytics or tracking of what happens in that process, at what point they give up - but it is somewhere in the account creation process.
If 80% (assuming) of people who click through to create an account give up before it's done, or they fail because of some Hive error, then fixing those would result in a 5 times increase in new users alone, without any extra marketing effort.
In reality these are all compounding problems. Lack of awareness makes our onboarding problem a bigger problem. Lack of new users makes our low retention a bigger problem. Fixing any one can help, but in truth all these issues need to be solved before Hive can pull itself out of this long lull.
Thank you for spending your time on this explanation.
Overall I don't agree with the focus on the 'Onboarding Barrier'. For me life has always been a search for reason to tackle hard challenges and get big rewards in exchange. If there's a why, I will find a how.
It could be worth while to conduct a big survey on how and why people got on board and stayed with their time and stake. Do you know of a survey like that, best case conducted since the fork?
No I don't, but I think a user survey would make for a good use of DHF funds if it were done by someone who is experienced in the method.
let me edit this a bit...
Here are my main questions:
Water always flows in the direction of least resistance, even if there's a desert at the end of the path. Humans have become adept at avoiding such death traps. We can find a better path, one that allows us to focus our energy only on long-term, valuable community members and then protect them.
Hmm, how do you like this raw attempt?
https://forms.gle/fStVkNqK9Qum5PEu6
Unverified so far, just to click around.
Even now that we have a promotion rally car? :P
Buenas cifras , hive la única red social Blockchain del mundo aparte de steemit.
Now we will see the way many campaigns are going and the market is going up and this is the most important thing. That all of these things will make us feel much better