I have written a few posts lately on the state of Hive, but then it has been on my mind. The platform has been around for a year, but had already benefited from several years of growth as Steem and a lot of the old users came over.
There are various ways to measure growth of internet platforms. A common one is the look at who is visiting it over the web. This is not so simple with Hive as there are multiple sites you can use. The two biggers (apart from gaming) are Peakd and Hive.blog. I use the Hypestat servive that picks up data from Alexa without you having to pay for access. You can see that both had good initial growth, but have plateaued and may be dropping a bit since the start of the year.
@Splinterlands is the most popular Hive dapp, so I thought I should check the stats for that too. You can see that it gets less visitors, but then it is not going to appear on searches for general topics as the blogging sites would.
What may be more useful is a service that actually looks at the blockchain. @dappradar does this.
Splinterlands appears to get more users than the others put together, but this may include a fair few bots and it indicates that a lot of people are not engaging with the social blogging side. I have long wished that the game could integrate some of that, even if it just shows game-related posts by players and could allow you to great a quick post about a recent battle.
DappRadar can show you historical data. For Peakd it has not changed too much.
DappRadar covers lots of blockchains. Overall Splinterlands is 11th, Peakd 35th and Hive.blog 52nd. For comparison Steemit is 17th with nearly five thousand users. No other Steem dapps can manage more than about four hundred. Steempeak will shut down soon.
I do think it is important to compare with Steem as that is the most similar platform, even if it is not really decentralised now. They still manage to attract users as the priority for many will be what they can earn and STEEM is worth about twice what HIVE is right now. That may be due to market manipulation (my speculation). I know that some people use both platforms to take advantage of the rewards. Others were effectively barred from Hive by lack of the airdrop or just not made welcome. In my opinion we should not be detering people who may have something to offer even if they chose the wrong side a year ago.
There are further stats we have access to. @penguinpablo and @arcange post post regularly with statistics they collect. Both show hundreds of new accounts being created each day. @ecency and @tipu are two of the biggest account creators. It looks like the latter does it via Hive Onboard. So why are we not seeing a significant rise in activity from all these new users? Even if some do not keep using Hive we ought to see thousands each month sticking with it.
We know there are usability issues with Hive. The main ones tend to be around usage of keys, but Keychain makes things relatively simple. It looks like Hive Onboard will make it easy to import your keys into the extension, but people should make a backup too.
Beyond all that the fact is that Hive is pretty much unknown to the majority of people. There are efforts to remedy that with some marketing. There are proposals for the offical marketing from @lordbutterfly and Twitter marketing from @nathanmars, but neither is funded right now. That is partly down to efforts to stabilise Hive Dollars.
Without marketing we are relying on word of mouth and that can have limited effect unless really big names take it up and we could wait a while for that to happen. People who are used to millions of followers may not be interested in a platform that only has thousands of users and the rewards may not be enough to tempt them to try it. I have often said that we should engage more with middle-ranking 'celebrities' who may have thousands of fans, but struggle to make much elsewhere. If they do give Hive a try then they should be encouraged so that they see it as worth their time. If they persuade hundreds of their fans to come across that could have a big network effect. The fans stand to earn too through curation or their own blogging.
One various podcasts and Facebook groups I encounter opinions about blockchain and cryptocurrency as being 'tulips' or a massive waste of energy. Obviously Hive is not relying on proof of massive energy usage like Bitcoin and the tulips thing misses the point.
I have been involved with this platform for well over four years and keep waiting for it to really take off. I am interested in opinions on why this has not happened and what we could be doing to improve matters.
What do you think?
One note: @kiokizz has a site - https://kiokizz.github.io/Splinterlands/seasonReportCard which requires keychain login, and generates a post including the previous season's player stats.
He usually gets 15-20 players using it each season; and is always looking for new stats to add.
Interesting. Not seen that before. There is Splintertalk, which I'm not sure I'd seen before, but there is nothing in the game it self that encourages people to blog. If people only ever play the game they may be barely aware of Hive. This is part of why I think we need more Hive branding across the dapps.
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BEER.Well you didn't include the different front ends.. like weedcash or leofinance .. those people are connecting with HIVE but not using one of the 2 front ends you mentioned. Both of which blow in my opinion.. although PeakD is the current weapon of choice
Leofinance actually does pretty well as a site with 80k daily visitors. On Stateofthedapps it shows up as only having a couple of hundred active users, but that seems wrong. It may be the third biggest of the blogging platforms, but has a specialist audience. It has also topped out on Alexa.
How big is Weedcash? The site seems broken. From what I have seen a majority of people use the two sites I listed. I prefer Peakd with all the features and I don't just look at financial stuff.
If you can find some source of stats that shows growth then I'd like to see it.
Weedcash is kinda small but there's a bunch of small front ends. They add up
Some big questions, to be sure.
One observation is that a lot of people write excellent articles/posts about the coolness of Hive... but of course, they publish them on Hive and then they share on their twitter accounts which were pretty much created to publicize Hive, so 90% of their followers are already on Hive. In other words, there are a lot of "positive vibes," but they are bouncing around in an echo chamber.
Lately, I have been pondering this same question. I've been considering years in marketing and advertising, along with vague memories from a University education I've never used...
Number one: Overcoming objections. Primary objection: "It's too confusing and complicated."
I think usability is improving. And that's very important. The de-facto standard for web usability is called "login with Facebook/Google." LeoFinance leads the way in that area with a "create account with your twitter information" as a starting point.
Number two: The "rewards" (lack of) issue. The rewards aren't the problem; the problem is that we're using rewards as the primary "carrot" to attract people. It's like using "free beer" as an incentive... sure, lots of people will show up, but when you run out of beer they all leave again.
One of the things I'm working on at the moment is revamping/redesigning all my business/hobby niche websites and blogs — some of which are 20 years old — to include relevant mentions of Hive.
And that's where communities come in. For example, I don't have lot of people I'd point to "Hive, in general" but I have a good segment I'd point at the Natural Medicine community. If it had a front-end interface as sophisticated as LeoFinance's, I could think of about 20 active people from that field who'd be shoo-ins, not because of rewards but because of the niche appeal and the feature that they wouldn't get posts taken down — like they have experienced on other sites — for talking about and recommending alternative healing processes. That's just one example. Another might be the writing communites I have been part of for 20 years. Similarly, I might point fellow micro-business operators to the CTP community.
But you'd never see those promotional efforts because I wouldn't be talking Hive... ON HIVE. However, the onboarding features are essential because I need to know when someone I recommended Hive to actually signed up, so they don't float around in a vacuum and feel confused and disgruntled.
Just thinking out loud...
=^..^=
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I do talk about Hive on other platforms. I suspect a lot of my Twitter followers are already on here. I don't have a lot of connections on Facebook, but I mention it there now and again. Some people have signed up, but are not using it.
Building good communities here could help. They can be fun, with the bonus of potential rewards.
Not everyone is so worried about the freedom aspect as they are quite happy to use corporate platforms. Hive needs to have a compelling experience.
Thanks for your input.
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BEER.I just had a discussion with @progressivechef about this the other day. I think one of the reasons new users don't stick around is the rewards or lack thereof for new users. When a new user comes on and takes time to write a fantastic post and then gets a penny of upvotes, then watches as others post a meme or a steps report and get over $100 in upvotes. Even if the new user gets curied once in a while for their great posts, it has to be extremely disheartening. Many of the whales may think seeing posts with high money values would be encouraging, as in "here is what you can get if you stick with it" but I think it has the opposite effect, discouraging and ultimately chasing new users away.
That is keeping people. And I think it is a huge problem. I know it's always been a problem—I remember people discussing it 4 years ago when I joined Steemit—but it is one we have never managed to solve.
As for attracting people, I agree with your ideas.
A fair few people can do well on a first post if it gets attention, but following that up can be hard. Hive is not always 'fair' and there are all sorts of reasons why certain people make a lot. I do okay from those who choose to support me. We need to set realistic expectations and make it clear it is not a 'magic money tree'. The higher price does help, but can encourage spammy behaviour and various forms of abuse. Some of us look out for that.
Sure, I agree with that. There shouldn't be an expectation of magic money nor of huge upvotes for every post. The people who understand that end up sticking around, like I have and like you have. But regardless of whether we agree with it, I think that is ultimately is what prevents high user retention here. Even if we stress again and again this isn't magic money, you have to work to build an audience, you have to network, etc, even if we do everything we can to set realistic expectations; people nod yes, but then see the high upvotes on low-effort posts and get discouraged. I agree it shouldn't happen, but it does, and solving this without also encouraging spam is the trick that we have to figure out how to solve.
This is the million dollar question.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin answering it. But it’s a serious question that needs addressing.
However my contribution to spreading the word of Hive will be another promo video. Something special this time.
It’s a passion project and I’m getting my brothers creative agency involved 😎💪🏻
Have you mentioned Hive to bands you work with? I expect they have a social media strategy, but they have to manage their time so they can actually make music.
All the people/groups I get on to Hive, they lose interest after 2-3 weeks and leave the account dormant.
They get confused/bored/disillusioned really quickly.
Seems like a losing battle even recommending it.
I guess if I could somehow guarantee bands some upvotes for being active and spreading their music then maybe there’s a chance.
This is what I've found too. I think the confusion part is the biggest snag. I've tried to encourage d.buzz because it's short, simple, Twitter-like, familiar maybe. But frankly very few have gone from joining to posting. I will say the only one who has done a small bit of activity, and even checked "what's it called...Hive?" today, was a personal aqaintance, someone I personally know and speak to face to face. That may say something. I don't know, but I'm still very bullish Hive.
Same. I’ve onboarded like 50 people through my store and just family & friends. I think 1 or 2 have tougher it out and are actually trying to build their “brand” and engage. The rest post a handful of times and bail. I truly don’t know how to get folks to stay once I beat the odds to even get em to take a look.
Retaining users is as important as getting them in the first place. I've always tried to make it fun. I made very little to start with, but the social side was good. People use other platforms for no reward, but the attitude here can be different. This is why we need more compelling content so people want to hang around here.
Agreed 100%
Well be sure to let us know they are here. Kickstarting an account is not easy. I will help out where I can.
The problem is that curation rewards aren't really curation rewards, they are agreement rewards.
If you disagree with a big stake curator , you will never get their vote no matter what you post in future . This creates a very cliquey platform and if you're not with the in crowd, you're hardly likely to succeed from a reward perspective.
The platform is simply about system gaming , quality posting is a minor attribute and as @enforcer48 said above , we need to get away from thinking it's purely a blogging platform.
Cliques are prevalent here and I benefit from that too. Not that I have any reciprocal voting deals with anyone. The big accounts hold the power and it is up to them if they decide to use it to improve matters rather then personal enrichment. They could do better in the long run if Hive grows and their stake gains a lot of value. That could dwarf their curation rewards.
Hive is an economy and I am no economist. For different people it's about investment, blogging, social, gaming or just a desperate attempt to earn anything. You can't reduce it to one thing.
Probably because it's still treated as a "blogging" platform and blogging hasn't been that popular for a long time now.
We don't focus on the dapps. We don't focus on the financial incentives (interest, HP staking, etc.). Most of the focus has been the same old "get paid to shitpost" from Ned era.
And you wonder why the only type of people Hive attracts are those who won't stay long when they can't get freebies. And when they do, it's because they are participating in some voting scheme that continues to "change their lives" at the expense of people who actually bought in.
In short, Hive doesn't attract investors. It's being used as a faucet for other ventures.
People do blogging without realising it on Facebook and elsewhere. The difference is that it's all public here, so you may not want to post your family photos. Twitter, Youtube and Instagram are pretty massive and I am not again short-form posting. I know some of it can get excessive rewards, but that could be part of the Hive growing pains.
There are lots of types of potential users. It could work as an investment, but many do not have the money to invest. We need diverse options and we're doing fairly well with that.
People can do what they like with the platform and developers will come up with new ideas. It should not just try to emulate what is already out there.
And that is their problem. It's one thing that Hive makes the barrier of entry lower. You don't need to invest a cent. But, that's also a double-edged sword, given where the money comes from.
At least with Doge, you'd have to buy in or receive tips from someone who did. Here at Hive, the problems can be at the very top and the extreme bottom, leaving people like us in the middle to feel the impact.
I don't think a platform that cannot cater to the "middle class" can succeed. They are literally the bulk of economic activity.
Being all things to everyone is hard. We've seen what difference Hive/Steem can make to people in places like Venezuela where a few dollars can feed a family. If people have talents to contribute then they should be able to earn, but of course there will be a 'dash for cash' by those just expecting a hand-out for no effort.
I am not too interested in rich people who want to get richer. Some might class me in that group, but I just consider myself 'comfortable'. I think I'm doing pretty well here really.
I have an interest in people like musicians being able to earn rather than just being exploited by corporations and the economy of Hive could be part of that. We each have our own angle.
Hive as a platform has no defined audience. As well, no leader to define who it's audience is going to be.
Leofinance is seeing success as you have a leader who has defined it's target audience and is working to streamline the process of bringing people.
Splinterlands has a leader(s) who defined it's audience and streamlined the process of bringing people.
Hive as a platform is trying to be too many things, to too many people with no one in particular leading the charge.
That's what I think anyhow :)
Isn't Hive just a platform to build things on? You can use it for one particular thing, but then you have access to the other aspects too. I do gaming, blogging, videos. Lack of a single leader has pros and cons.
I wonder how many Leo users look at other Hive stuff considering they may not even know they are on Hive.
I believe it is a platform to build things on, however that's not really clear to the average outsider looking in and there is no clear way to find that information. Go to google and type in hive blockchain and you get Hive Blockchain Technologies Ltd. so it even confuses things more.
Leo users have most likely heard of the hive blockchain since it's probably talked about quite frequently, but perhaps the question is do they care? The average user doesn't care if the database behind what they use is MS SQL, Oracle or MySQL.
I agree that a single leader has pros and cons. Certainly we saw that in the last iteration with Steem. I guess if the belief is that HIVE is to build on, then target that audience and be clear that this is it's purpose. Jump on hive twitter and you get the impression that it's a social media platform for the most part. Search it on google and you get nothing for the most part.
It took Splinterlands a little while to rank first on search engines. To put a more positive spin on a quote I shared in another comment to this article:
My personal take is marketing emphasis should be on the second-layer of HIVE, its DApps. Then again it depends on where the marketing is being targeted.
-- Vloggers
-- Bloggers
-- Gamers
Each of the above targeted groups requires a different marketing strategy. There is no one size fits all.
We as a community can do this. There is no doubt in my mind. No need to hire a marketing agency. We have the talent right here on our blockchain.
We don't need permission to do something as WE ALL OWN HIVE!
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The Hive name sucks as you can't search for it. The lack of branding across the various dapps is bad too. Leo may be great, but finance is a minor part of my interests. People should be encouraged to explore other things on Hive as they have the account anyway. You may buy a Windows PC (I wouldn't) to use Office, but you get access to so much more.
I do wonder if we will see some dapps go their own way as DLive did.
Did not work out well for DLIVE. It is now part of the Justin (f**ck me) Sun Empire.
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Well I expect someone got paid well for that. There are some who only build a business in order to sell it rather than to keep it going. Justin seems to taint everything he touches, but the fans are blind to that.
Very good point!
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The fact that no one is at the helm is what led me to Hive in the first place, leadership breeds a sense of hierarchy, I like the fact that we are a captainless ship. :)
Yes, for Hive to go "mainstream" it most definitely needs to be more newbie-friendly. Maybe there needs to be a "newbie" frontend. Somewhere new users could go and get questions answered. Find tutorials on how to do things. Maybe walk them through creating posts step-by-step, including how to upload images, links, etc. Provide links to tools they can use. Pixabay, the meme one, hive-Buzz, block explorer, etc. Even have some sort of "chat" function that they could use to ask questions and, ideally, get a small reward for using it.
You could even "gamify" the beginning to a certain extent. Earn 1 Hive for completing such and such a step. Earn 100 delegated Hive for completing 10 steps. Teach people how to bookmark frontends and then allow them to earn rewards for "exploring" different tribes. Instead of giving badges for 10 comments and 50 comments and 100 comments, give them 1 Hive, 5 Hive, 10 Hive. This could all come out of the DHF budget at least initially. I also think a lot of users on here would be willing to donate or delegate to a project like this.
Realistically, there could almost be a token created that would feed the newbies. I think about how LBI and UTOPIS pay dividends. If you created a token that strictly curated the "newbie tribe" with it's curation rewards and then the "investors" would get maybe small dividends and price appreciation, it might be something some of the dolphins and whales would fund.
I mean, the saying is, give a man a fish and feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime. Hive shows people the fish and then throws boats, poles, tackle, bait, reels, lures, rods, nets, and sunscreen at them all at once and says, "Here you go. All you need to feed yourself for a lifetime. Just figure it out." Is it any wonder most people would rather just buy the fish and eat it?
Anyway, just throwing out ideas. I'm not much of an implementation guy but I do tend to come up with a good idea here and there. Take it for what it's worth.
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Some of these ideas are really good! I agree that even after the challenge which is getting a login, then you need to know so many things to post something and get votes. What should you tag? What community to post in? Do I need to be in Discord as well? It's just a ton of confusing things, and because it's hard to do it right, then people will skip the whole thing.
Not sure about the newbie token, but why not?
That's actually a great idea really. Set up a hive tribe for crypto newbies. If enough effort was put in you could make it a landing space for all people wanting to learn more about decentralisation, crypto, Web3. It would need to be super simple but could have its own simple toke isation for people to learn with different items to spend it on.
If the project was built well enough you could get other crypto communities to sponsor lessons and learning material for their projects. Get telos to sponsor so much for users to set up a telos wallet and join a certain app.
Complete so many lessons and earn a splinterlands starter pack. Logins would need to be twitter/Facebook and everything else complicated to be hidden. Just set up a good learning system and give the option for them to explore anything else they want in crypto.
People want to learn more so having a site where they can like coinbase did with their earning site could work very well.
The front ends should provide help to newbies. Where are the tutorials to get them started? Giving rewards for activity is tricky as people will try to game that for profit. If they are doing the right things they can earn anyway from the votes of others.
The front ends should also be generous in telling people what other options there are. Someone who signs up through LeoFinance may want to blog about other things or play games. When you go there it is not even obvious that it runs on Hive. There are lots of dapps now and they should be easier to find with 'Built on Hive' branding.
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BEER.A second comment by me, but with a new insight.
After several days I very slowly understand the mechanisms on Hive. To say they are not bad in general. But they are very, very unfriendly to new users.
Btw. thx @steevc for helping me!!
Some days ago I needed to create another account to interact with peakd as I do not have keys from leofinance account. Very soon I ran out of ressource credits, leaving me unable to interact with Hive. For further interaction I have to wait for days. That is not the way to encourage new users :/
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The resource credits are needed to prevent new accounts spamming the system. With your delegated HP you ought to be able to comment a bit. If you earn HIVE you will get past this issues.
What other aspects are bad? I see other new users just getting on with it.
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BEER.Dan Larimer leaving to Build Steemit 2.0
Ned Scott failure to execute SMT
Steem Hostile Take over
was major reasons why we couldn't grow.
My main focus to bring investors/partnership to HIVE and build community that last for 100 years.
We just one major investor away from massive growth who can empower entrepreneurship within HIVE and empower partnership with major Crypto communities like ADA, ETH, EOS, BNB and LINK.
On the contrary, putting the resources into that in the first place rather than into core competences was the problem IMO.
Our community learned so much from the past.
Now we're in the second year of HIVE and time for our community to rise up.
Governance, DAO and Growth is what is going to determine future of our HIVE
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What is the selling point for investors? They will be looking at what they can get out of it. Of course they can earn just from curation, but the big money will be if HIVE really goes up, even if it takes a while to extract your funds. Everyone is looking for a return on their investments and crypto has raised expectations of huge profits. It's all a big challenge, but I know you are on the case.
I'm not talking about that kind of investors.
We need investors who wants to empower creator economy, freedom of speech, decentralisation and tokenised communities.
We need partnership that empowers decentralised social media platforms of the future.
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Interesting post, I agree that a mass marketing strategy can accelerate the adoption of people to the community! this being of great collective benefit. It would not be bad to think of a fund with people committed to this interest, which allocates a large part of the funds to carry out a disruptive marketing in a massive and segmented way! I still do not lose hope that this will happen and I would surely like to be part of it!
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There was a marketing group on Discord, but it has gone quiet. Maybe the current proposals can get funded to get things moving.
If you think about it, it would be great taking advantage of the euphoria that currently exists, it helps in a way that people have more receptivity
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Maybe we need a little proposal to do some research based on people who have dropped off and out - try to get a representative sample and ask them!
I guess some other data that would be useful that we could get on chain would be 'stickability' - what proportion of users that make x amount of posts in the first month stick around for y number of years.
It'd be easy enough to then correlate that with rewards to test the 'lack of rewards' or 'lack of engagement' theories about causes of drop-off.
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Hive is a good platform to do analysis on, although I've lost access to HiveSQL for now as it's gone back to a paid subscription. Those who do the stats posts could so some about how many people actually stick with it.
It'd be interesting to see - I guess that sub is more expensive now if it's paid in HBDs!
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Well it's free again anyway for now as enough people voted up the proposal.
In my opinion what is missing is some sort of coherent cooperation between parts of Hive ecosystem. Why not include links to other services on the major frontends? Why there are no tutorial with Hive tools (keychain, hive-now, etc.) and community guidelines on the start? People feel lost and this is highly discoureging for new users. We shot our own foot.
On the marketing site I would start with inviting 500-10000 followers content creators from YouTube, people not getting significant reward from centralized social media can use opportunity to diversify source of income. YT blocks comments so I used business offers tab with email address, but it's hard to make it look legit with gmail address... Hive.io email address available for users would help, professionalism in disguise :)
I fully agree on the lack of links and tutorials. If someone joins any of the dapps they should be presented with helpful information and encouraged to try other dapps. The dapp owners should not be selfish in trying to keep users to themselves. Gamers may want to blog and bloggers may want to post videos.
If we bring in some small Youtubers they can be mentored and rewarded to encourage them to bring followers across. I keep saying that an influx of a few thousand people would make a massive difference to Hive.
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BEER.I think the same @steevc. I even wrote a case for Community Driven Hive Twitter Marketing led by @nathanmars to let everyone know its importance and how Hive's biggest pain point is marketing. Word of mouth is not working anymore since nobody is trying to do it with proper planning and a sustainable, scalable approach. We should not only support such proposals but encourage more people to come forward with ideas on how to solve the 'visibility' problem for HIVE.
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@nathanmars is a great guy. We need more like him, but a coherent marketing strategy would help.
Exactly @steevc! I think with proper planning we can bring in a lot of eyeballs to Hive. This platform is so underrated.
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Being a new user myself, I think usability is one of a big issue. First I had problems to understand Hive's mechanisms, then I am really, really limited. E.g. my first account on hive.blog cannot post comments for 2 days, because it lacks ressource credits. ... This is not the way to attract new engagement.
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I've delegated you some more HP so you can be more active. I recommend peakd as a better front end than hive.blog. The resource credit limit is important to reduce the issues with spam and other abuse. I think that if the system gets overloaded then the cost of posting goes up.
Hive definitely needs tutorials that every new user will see.
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saw it on hive explorer thank you so much for giving me the power to speak! :P ;)
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Yes this is something I spoke about in this thread as well, new users should be getting 100 hp to start with that is delegated to them, currently, leo starts your account with 10 hp, but lets be honest there is plenty of hp to throw around if people are serious about keeping new users
yeah, right. might be that peakd might start with even less
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BEER.It's a 90 day moving average. As a result, a recent increase in traffic is not likely to be registered as an uptick in the graphic but rather an uptick in the slope of the graph (which can be seen for hive.blog at least).
Three years ago Steemit managed an Alexa rank of under 1000 and that may have been when STEEM was a top ten coin. We're nowhere near that now with Hive, but there is a lot more competition. Hive is looking like an also-ran rather than a winner and I just wonder if we can turn that around.
We are recovering from a major reset, especially wrt brand recognition, we can only compare ourselves to post-fork Hive. I agree with you that competition in the space is getting tougher. And yet, I couldn't pick a stronger project if you asked me to, and right now I feel more confident in Hive than I felt in either Steem or Hive for years (primarily because we have gotten inflation under control, the biggest issue nobody was talking about), but also dozens of other 'little problems' have been eliminated recently.
Good to hear you are confident. I think Hive has a lot going for it, but as for 'brand recognition' the name is not great. Just try googling it. At least I could find articles about Steem/Steemit.
Yes I agree, it's terrible. I liked the name 'Hive' at first, but it didn't take long to realize that it is truly awful for discovery, SEO etc.
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We need community-driven marketing with clear objectives, funded by the community.
Vote for the proposals, folks!
@tipu curate
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Upvoted 👌 (Mana: 0/22) Liquid rewards.
I think there are issues with proposals due to HBD being too high. Some big players stopped voting for them until that is sorted out.
In the sense that they will get too much? Eh, this is the crypto world after all.
OK, what are the alternatives? Community-led promotion on a voluntary basis? As we are already doing?
We've been doing community promotion for years and it's not getting us there. Steem at least got some media coverage. I see very little for Hive, but then it is hard to find due to the generic name. I don't have the answers, which is why I wrote the post. Others know much more about marketing. There are so many sites and products trying to get noticed online and we need to stand out.
Steem got a corporate-level promotion with the overtake. Paid promoters and trolls :)
Hive has naive voluntary promoters. Actually, we are doing quite good if we see things from this perspective :)
MySpace payed bands, and influencers to come post there, and went from nothing, to millions of users in a year. If we could get a large enough marketing budget, you could pay mid-teir celebrities, and public figures to post say 1 exclusive video or post a week. Maybe promise them a certain amount of Hive of they do it weekly for months? If they have a decent stake waiting for them, they might be encouraged to promote to their fans on other platforms.
I was an early steem adopter that let my page go dormant. I just a few days ago found my keys, to explore Hive. One thing I was surprised to see was that there were several alt media figures posting here who's work I consume elsewhere, yet I've never heard them mention Hive. That kinda bummed me out, and I've been wondering why they just post here, instead of pushing the platform like they do rokfin or LBRY.
I'm still exploring all the new features and such, but I'm gonna make a post going over how I feel about Hive. What I like, and some. Concerns I have.
There is an incredible amount of potential here. The marketing for steemit was always a joke imo. I'm not professional but I always felt that if I had that budget, I could see more results. But I'm probably talking out my ass. Hive has a chance to do it right, and maybe we can bukld something lasting, and impactful.
The Tsu platform I used before Steem has some celebrities at the start, who I assume were paid, but they did not stick around. The rewards there (based on ads) were probably not enough and the audience may have been lacking too.
The delegation system we have is a great way to kickstart an account without actually giving them money. They can give out votes to fans.
I know of a few accounts here who have hundreds of thousands of fans elsewhere, but hardly engage on Hive. They may just have someone copying over posts for the sake of it. Audience really matters, but it is a chicken/egg situation. We need 'names' to bring in fans, but kickstarting that is hard.
A lack of a company to back things like marketing can be part of the problem, but it didn't help Steem much.
Yeah delegation is a great tool. I still have a lot.of catching up to do on Hive, the initiatives that are going, and the whales influencing things around here. I just claimed my keys a couple days ago. I'll have a better idea if things in a couple weeks.
beautiful this post, full of interesting observations and statistics. I too am amazed that HIVE is a platform that hasn't exploded yet. However, I must admit that I have shown this platform several people of which more than half are unable to get used to a system that is only slightly more complicated than what a social network like Instagram or Facebook can be. Perhaps there is a need for a generational change, perhaps we will see a good explosion in 2025.
Hive is more complex than other platforms, but that is partly because it is decentralised. We have tools like Keychain to make life easier. People have to put in the work if they want to earn, but it can be fun too.
It is all quite complicated. I wanted to create 2 accounts this week to get friends going but it would only let me make one from that IP. I think a buddy system for new users would be awesome!
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How were you creating them? I have plenty of resource credits if you need me to create more accounts.
on hive onboard, it said I had already created one account on the IP address...
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I guess they want to prevent people abusing it to create lots of accounts. There is a cost involved. Ideally people should do it themselves. Make sure they get Keychain installed to make life easier.
I would hope someone has done tutorial videos on the sign-up process.
I am going to try later!
I brought a few friends but only a couple are still around. One thing is certain, those who left early lost some good moments. Others lost their keys and never came back. I recently influenced some people to invest in Hive but it's been a while since I last brought someone on board.
I guess people prefer to chat than work on actual posts.
I like steady growth, so I'm not too worried but you're right... it's about time Hive goes to the next level.
Not everyone is a blogger, but we could do more with communities to give people stuff to engage with. I think Hive can have a variety of forms of content so it can compete with Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and others.
I think the biggest reason is retention rate. They can probably skip the troubles a little bit by going through LeoFinance to make an account but most people are troubled learning how HIVE works. Though they might want their keys eventually to use all the features in HIVE.
I know I was confused about things when I first started and it was also the reason why it took me a long time before I started being more active. Some of them might try out for a week or two and see little to no rewards then quit (not understanding which tags communities and etc). If a new user pops by and starts voting/commenting on whatever they see, then they might run into an RC problem. There are resources to help them through this stage like giftgiver but newbies will not know about it.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
so true and the very same here!
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I agree that retention is lacking. If even half of those many new accounts kept going Hive would be massive. They need guidance and support in the early days until they find their way.
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BEER.Something I think, and I can not speak for others in what effort they are putting forth, but I take this project personally, and I take every opportunity I have to pitch the idea of hive both to individuals, and low to mid-tier content creators.
But it takes people like us, taking the time to engage with people who are not on hive yet.
I think a lot of individuals who are on hive, are focused on earning hive, not promoting it. And I don’t mean that to be offensive I just think some people are enjoying their time here, and trying to increase their presence on the blockchain, and not focused on increasing awareness of the blockchain to the world at large.
I think part of it is outreach to those not onboard yet, but also outreach to convince those who are onboard to take this task personally and to start their own marketing campaigns.
There are initiatives like HivePosh community allowing people monetize their Hive marketing efforts.
I’m gonna check that out
It was originally begun by theycallmedan, cofounder of 3Speak and was picked up by the OCD Community and markymark is involved too.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
People need to realise that the growth of Hive is in their interest. If it gets bigger then it becomes a more valuable asset. Everyone gains from that. The big accounts should use their power to keep good creators coming back and not just vote up their friends.
im not involved with leofinance but they built an easy way to onboard new users where they can sign up for hive in a few clicks, but not many people know this, I am pretty active on Hive and I had no idea you could sign up with twitter. Part of the marketing strategy has to focus on the fact that posting on hive is uncensored
The Leo sign-up is a nice option to have. We need some good tutorials that people can easily find to help them get started. Not everyone has a mentor.
From what people are saying it seems to get a lot of sign-ups who give up quickly. Retaining users is important.
Very good point about retaining users, maybe we can make a newcomers community, it can be for new people and those who want to help new people. To make newcomers feel more welcome and help them learn how to use Hive because at first, it can be a little overwhelming. Established accounts on here that have some hp to throw around should help boost new users, I believe that nothing will retain users like seeing rewards or seeing that their post is doing well. Often newcomers sign up and they struggle to get traction and this could be the cause of losing people after they sign up. If a community for new users is built I think people will make the effort to make sure that new accounts succeed.
People should be looking out for newbies anyway. Those early weeks here can be vital and they need help.
I joined Hive back when it was named that other coin and I recently wrote a post about why I chose to post my content on Hive and why others should as well https://peakd.com/hive/@wedacoalition/why-content-creators-should-use-the-hive-blockchain
I understand what you are saying that users should be aware of new users but imagine if we had a community dedicated to this, where Hive OGs could see all the new users in one place wouldn't it be easier?
I had no clue that splinterlands is generating that much traffic. I have stated for years that without marketing it will be a bit hard to get Hive mainstream. I'm sticking to this reasoning.
Posted Using LeoFinance Beta
The game seems pretty popular, but I wonder how many accounts are bots as I see a few there. Lots of people say we need marketing, so need to make that happen.
I am actually a bit surprised that the Leo front end isn't higher on the list. They have been on fire lately with the stuff they are doing.
I suspect the dapp stats sites are not always detecting activity properly. Some games, like Rising Star, barely register on DappRadar despite having hundreds of players. Maybe Leo is under-reported.
I do think it is an issue that when you go to Leo Finance there is no sign that it runs on Hive. People should be aware of the whole ecosystem as they may be into things other than finance.
somewhere on leos homepage they should mention that it is built on the Hive blockchain
Exactly. All the dapps should with a link to https://hive.io/ or something.
To grow hive, there needs to welcome new users with affection. Many times new users kicked by old users on Hive. It is very sad.
I find most people are welcoming, but if you are seen as abusing the platform you will get 'kicked'. We want rewards to go to those who earn them.
I see Hivewatchers caught you out.
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I just shared this on @leomarkettalk recently:
This is not the answer to all the issues stunting the growth of HIVE. It is a good rule for any endeavor however.
To quote a portion of your article:
It boils down to a question of priorities. The current top 21 witnesses determine those priorities as our stake-based elected governance.
I am in full agreement with your take on enticing middle-ranking celebrities. We have 3Speak and, dare I say, DTube that are connected to HIVE. I read somewhere that YouTubeTM is second to GoogleTM in internet searches.
Netscape as well as America Online at one time ruled the internet. Ask a person born in the past 20 years what those two are? They will probably say: Netscape is a TV series on Netflix and America Online has something to do with politics!
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