Is it time to shift more focus onto direct onboarding?

I made a post some time ago looking at OCD's numbers, the numbers were fetched by @hivetrending using things like the beneficiary settings and ocd's account creation tokens to validate them. TL;DR, we had roughly 15% retention rate throughout 4 years onboarding roughly 3000 accounts with 450 still being active within the last month.

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The activity in our onboarding initiative is not great, you can kind of estimate the amount of new users being onboarded by how often the @ocdb posts get posted with 8-10 new users being highlighted in each post and the rewards going to the onboarders for having spent time and effort to onboard, guide and curate the new users. Meaning for the most part this is done by people who like doing it as the rewards aren't that great.

Something I've been wondering about is, how do we scale this properly?

The DHF could be a solution to reward active onboarders better so that they could focus more on it rather than just doing it as a hobby that may earn them a little.

Now I haven't really crunched many numbers or anything, but I figured I'd use this post to see what you guys think about it. We at OCD wouldn't mind shifting our curation focus a bit more on curating onboarded users as that's something that's taken quite some voting power from us as of late.

The idea of course would be that the more users we bring on the more decide to stay and the more stay active and continue to remain active and potentially even bring users in on their own. While the onboarders who have a task that may require quite a lot of effort to do well and time spent may earn some extra rewards transparently for bringing in new people.

We may be spending a lot of money on things like brand marketing, conferences, etc, but very few of those are giving us any legitimate numbers as to how many real users it's bringing in compared to direct onboarding. Our 3000+ onboarded users can all be tracked and validated by the community and we intend to keep it that way (although we'd love to update some of our onboarding tools to move away from hiveonboard.com to a more maintained platform).

Anyhow, this post is mostly just meant to work as a sound check to see what people think about it cause I don't think continuing to use the author rewards pool is going to scale well if we want this initiative we've honed somewhat to be as seamless as possible to grow and after a while see if it's making a real difference. If you think about it, 450 users still being active today after the 3000 we've onboarded for minimal rewards is still quite a large number if all active users we have today are around 5000 as I've heard that number flying around. It'd be interesting to see what we could do with 10-50x more onboarders being active at once and curation projects and stakeholders shifting their focus on welcoming the new users with part of their votes.