Hey everyone!
As some of you might know, OCD has been running the community incubation program for a while now and it's been growing steadily - currently around 40 communities incubated. Here's a quick "what it is and what do we do" for anyone not aware.
We find or let niche communities apply to our incubation through our Discord.
We delegate them HP based on their subscriber count to encourage growth.
We let them nominate posts they want to reward more in their community and vote them up after.
We encourage them to write curation reports that they share the rewards of with other curators or moderators in their community.
We listen to feedback on how to improve the process. : )
One idea we had recently was for instance the curation reports to set aside a percentage towards the post reward liquidating account @reward.app so that we'd know that those who do this are using that percentage to tip comments and posts that are decent but maybe not great enough for nomination of our votes. Some communities have participated in this and enjoyed it the results whereas others haven't attempted it or had any interest, it's not been mandatory just something we thought would improve the community experience for users participating in it. These posts would receive a bigger vote than usual with part of it being used towards tipping which is something the @peakd front-end makes so easy for both posts and comments so we were hoping more use would come to it to highlight the feeless transactions our blockchain can offer on top of the monetization through stakebased curation.
Some issues we've been facing lately, but not much of, has been certain community leaders not being that interested in growing their community. They've been invited to our incubation and given most of the tools to let us help their community grow, which after a short time is not that complicated of a process which I'm sure the other incubated community participants can back me up on. After some time the interest was just gone from some leaders and it made it a bit difficult for us to know how to move forward.
For example having curators and moderators from other communities or from the OCD team pick up the curation for them and grow their community without knowing how that leader may act in the near future - they are the owner of the community account so they could easily go 180 at some point and start muting accounts at random or make their community unusable in other ways by changing the rules, etc. Instead we figured that a community such as that niche is still something we'd want to support and see grow so the solution there was to either create our own or support one of the other communities that are similar to it that exist. We (OCD) are in no way attempting to centralize community management and even when we have created new communities we've let curators create the accounts themselves with the trust they've built through us hoping that the amount of support and attention we'd provide to it won't go to waste in the near future.
A few new communities came to life recently after we proposed this change as to abandon some that seemed uninterested to want to be active in the ones they've created and were incubated for (some of this inactivity is common and I'm not trying to blame the leaders for it, real life exists and Hive is not the main priority for everyone :P) but it's been nice to see how quickly they sprung to life and we're looking forward to kickstart more new communities but also old ones that aren't as active in the near future with contests, focused curation for a certain amount of time, etc. One of these new communities, started by @roadstories called Hive Pets already has 221 subsribers and 150 active users after only a couple weeks of existing! I honestly can't believe a community focused on pets of our users didn't exist yet so I'm sure there's a lot more yet to spring to life that we're looking forward to assisting in getting their limelight and growth.
On an ending note, I also want to mention that as the name says "incubation" there will also be a time where certain communities will have become too big and too active to be in our roster any longer, it'll be like having kids and watch them go to college and we're just going to have to let them go even if they secretly want to continue staying home. :P
I'd also like to recommend content creators reading this to check out on which those communities are that we are incubating, I'm sure there's something you can find that suits you and you can call home once you get used to posting and interacting with users there. I'm really excited to see how well it's progressing and can't wait to see what an influx of new users will do to these communities - along with hopefully some incentive fixes on how curation and certain rules around it work in a future hardfork!
Now that you have a general idea of what the incubation does if you weren't aware of it before, we'd love to hear if you have any more ideas on how we could improve on it aside from what I already mentioned. We'll consider anything that's reasonable and in our power to change. Thanks for reading and keep making communities awesome!
PS! We've generally refrained from adding communities that also have a tribe behind them as we wouldn't want to indirectly affect token prices or users investing in it's future based on our involvement as we may at any time discontinue the incubation of certain tribes if there's something we don't think is bringing value to the ecosystem of Hive. There have been some exceptions, though, where we've thought the niche was too big to not support and the activity behind it was there but we hope people do their due diligence if they decide to invest into these tokens as we haven't done any research on the tokenomics of said tribes nor does our incubation endorse them in that way. Having said that we have a stricter application process for those who have a token behind them and we generally talk it out with them properly before adding them to our incubation.
Hey Acid I believe it is working well as slowly sports is getting new authors of a decent standard writing regularly these days. We have a lot to do to still grow and our target of 1000 users by the end of the year will be close but we will fall short by 40 odd or so. The OCD involvement has helped tremendously over the 3 months and we have a long way to go still. I have been meaning to look at reward app at some point as I have never used it before as I have been using two accounts to reward users in sports.
Hey Acid, I hope you're well. I think you're doing a great job so keep it up.
I notice one thing you mention above, community leaders not interested in growing their community. I've not been invited to the incubation thing, nor have I asked to be involved...It's not that I don't want to see the three communities (all niche communities) grow, just that I don't have the time to invest in them to do so, nor do I really know what's involved. I don't use Discord much and am not that tech-savvy so...I just sort of do my own thing and the interest in my communities reflects that lack of active input as far as growth goes.
So...Having said that, maybe it's not that community leaders don't want to see growth, maybe there's others like me who just feel that the time involved is not time they have?
I'm not complaining or whinging, just raising a point I guess. I could be way off base.
Anyway, from what I see you are doing a good job and making a difference. Keep it up.
Yeah, so, in an essence what is involved in the incubation is this:
You get a designated channel for your community and a role that all community leaders share, there you just input links to posts you want more rewarded. The reason we went for channels instead of just going through the curation report posts is that some times when we get up to speed to vote through all nominations community leaders may appreciate a more "up to date" trending than having posts after the fact voted up 1-5 days late depending on when they end up writing the curation report and how active the community is (i.e. if there's only been 6 great posts to nominate in the last 3 days then write 2 per week, etc)
As for the curation reports, this is mainly to invite more curators, moderators and helpers to your community, with these posts you can easily share beneficiary rewards based on who helped how much that week and incentivize everyone to be active in curating, engaging and bringing life to the community. Of course many do so also without extra incentives like you but this is also meant to offload some work from only 1 person onto others they trust are helping the community grow and stay active.
So not sure if this answered your question, but say if we were to incubate your Pew community, you could invite other gun enthusiasts you trust and they could be in charge of dropping nominations along with you onto the channels, one of you could do the curation reports, share the rewards with each other, maybe set some aside through @reward.app to be used for tipping comments, etc.
We're also working on some ways to assist smaller communities so that we can incubate them into trials and kick it off with contests and focused curation to see if activity sticks onto them and continues past the "boost" so that the community can remain in the incubation longer until it is too big and won't need us anymore. Maybe you'd be interested in applying with one of yours by then. :)
Hmm, ok that seems straightforward enough I guess.
So the channel is on Discord and all the leaders do is drop links there for promotion and someone (from amongst those leaders) writes a weekly curation post/report.
I suppose I often think there's simply not enough PEW or LEGO content to make it worth while. The Engage the weekend community also if I'm honest. This is why I've just sort of driven them myself and left your project for other more deserving communities.
I mean the PEW community is certainly something that could garner a lot of attention quick, especially with so many american's on Hive! :D
Stay tuned for when we start doing these trial runs of focused curation + contests to see if it will get you the activity you'd feel comfortable with in the community!
I'll keep my peepers peeled. 👍🙄
Oh and also, we would of course prefer the leader to be somewhat active still, of course activity can go in waves but we wouldn't want them to invite 2-3 helpers, push all the workload onto them and just go AFK while growing their accounts from our delegation and allowing them to front-run posts to receive higher ROI. So we do keep an eye on that too to make sure they're doing it because they genuinely are interested and experienced with the niche the community is about and not just in it for the wrong reasons.
Of course...I think that wouldn't be a problem for me, I'm fairly active. 🙂 (Although I've let myself down in the Lego community lately...Which will be rectified in the next few weeks when I'm on holiday from work.)
Don't let the lego's down or they'll start appearing at random on your floor for you to step on!
Haha! Yeah, the worst pain known to mankind. 🤣
Hi Acid!
When you say niche community, that means communities on a certain topic. I run a community close like a niche community, we give challenge questions on different topics in which authors make their entries to it. So posts in the community are entries to the questions we give them to write about.
The community is run by me, @tripode and @cwow2. We have been actively running it by ourselves. The community was created October 29 and so far we have attained 290 subscribers, 696 Interactions and 576 pending rewards. We hope to support more authors in the community and we really want more growth in the community as we have series of contests and challenges planned already for 2021. You can check the community here.
I don't know if our community is the type that would be acceptable to be in your incubation program. If it is, it would really help more in the plans we have aheah for the community.
I think you should discuss this via the ocd discord server.
Done!!!
I love what you do, @acidyo. Thank you.
Cheers! :)
Happy feedback to you, happy feedback to you, happy feedback dear OCD community incubation program and @acidyo, too!
Great news about Hive Pets - that's a lovely inclusive community that lots of people can contribute to.
The OCD incubation programme is working really well for The Ink Well and helping with the ambition to create a long-term sustainable income for short-story writers. There are some challenges to running communities. Maybe an option could be some posts from community leaders with tips so that, over time, there becomes a little guide or resource for prospective leaders. Perhaps an OCD challenge could be: "What I've learned in the past year/my life time as an online community leader" or something even more snappy 😁.
Reward.app is a great idea and offers lots more flexibility. We've used it primarily to build prizes, and in January we're running the Fast and Furious Festival with a greater focus on engagement, using tips to reward comments. We see tipping as a really important development for writers to earn long-term from their posts, so we're looking forward to starting to build a tipping culture.
More specific communities, more niches. The diversity is great. The users have more options to post content that suits the community.
But what I think in my head, what will be the community if the community no more in ”The Incubation” Program, because of less supporters. Many users seem to get big support just from OCD. Besides Curie or Curangel.
Anyway, thanks for your greaaat job of maintaining all of those communities.
OCD has been a great community and it's given me confidence in posting and remaining active. I have even been investing in hive and hope to one day be able to not need OCD and support the communities I'm in.
Haii
Both Shadow Hunters and Feathered Friends have grown at a steady pace thanks to OCD curation. Every valid post into the communities receive tips and votes from us.
All comments made on any members posts within the communities receive staked ARCHON tokens and we give out many ENGAGE tokens to promote Comments being made on community posts. We host contests in both Shadow Hunters and Feathered Friends as a means to provide more curation opportunities and give members a reason to post into the communities more often. The contests also give more opportunities for members and mods to be involved in management of the communities.
I'm looking forward to seeing more growth in 2021!
Hi, Acid. It's amazing all the things OCD are doing right now, plus the new communities created, we all now there will be a lot of more communities and we need them, there's still a lot of content who doesn't fit in any place. I usually post the literature I write in @theinkwell community, and recently they post about closing the community for the holidays and every post who doesn't fit on the writing prize that they made will be muted, (I think this is useless), I have to be honest, I didn't read that post and posted there, of course, my post was muted and more than a day after that they leave a comment explaining why they did it, and It's pointless to create a community and close to only entries for a challenge, then you can create your community for the challange and nothing more, why do you mute something that fits in the community only because it doesn't belong to the challange, you have to be so shortminded to make things that way, if you don't to want to have a literature community but you want people to participate in the writing prize only, create the writing prize community and don't make a literature community to close it. The Ink Well needs a better managment, I guess, there's a lot of better ways to make things right.
This is very interesting... thank you very much.
Hi there,
I have recently created a learning community and looking for support to build it. As I am also new to this platform the voting power is very less and this is the reason why the welcome post of the community didn't make it to the trending section and hence people didn't know about the community.
The aim of the community is to bring equality in learning and decrease the learning gap.
This is the idea of the community:
https://hive.blog/hive-123740/@knowledgefruit/welcome
This has the potential to bring a revolution in learning, to go beyond just a community. Kindly look into it.
Is the thegoodwhales.io project still active? If yes, how to apply for the whitelist? @ocdb @acidyo
Only the delegators tab is active on the website. Delegating to @ocdb gets you daily liquid returns but other than that no other perks such as upvotes. Those must be earned by providing quality content mostly in the communities.
Got it. Is there any way to see the best users to delegate? Or it doesn't matter and it only depends on the amount you send as delegation? I have seen some users saying that will share much more than others if you delegate to them.
Posted via D.Buzz
Not sure, there's probably some people tracking that, if you're getting more returns you might want to ask yourself how those are possible though (more often than not it's just blatant front-running of votes on already popular authors to get max returns and may not have the best effects on the platform and your investment). Having said that there's a new hardfork planned that'll make curation rewards linear soon and pretty much everyone will earn the same returns from curation so it won't matter much who you delegate to.