Onboarding thoughts and plans

For those of you new or not aware, in @ocd we have an active onboarding initiative ongoing which is quite unique in a way to other onboarding attempts but it has shown quite some decent results over the years. Let me start off with this screenshot of a website/tool created by @spiritsurge:

One thing to keep in mind is that the @ocdb onboardees aren't part of the onboarding initiative, that account is simply offering free account credits to @hiveonboard which is used by a handful of front-ends and dapps (@peakd being one of them) and has some restrictions and limitations along with abuse-filters. I also need to mention that I don't know why the retention rate is so high there looking at "Retention by Activity" at 22.8%. Maybe cause other ones get abused more heavily and hiveonboard isn't displayed on the https://signup.hive.io/ page, thus mainly used naturally through @peakd, unsure.

What I am sure of however, is that @ocd's account creations are mainly for our onboarding project.

The main difference of our onboarding inititive compared to others is that onboarders take their time to "guide" people about hive. Whether this happens 1 on 1, through webinars, conferences, seminars, etc, there's more effort and guidance involved here so the directly onboarded users are more aware of what awaits them, what to do, what not to do, etc. Some may still do what they shouldn't be doing, but that's life I suppose and for that we have anti-abuse measures in place getting paid by the DHF to find and counter these instances of abuse such as hivewatchers (even though at times it feels like they get paid to complain about us not noticing abuse on our own).

When we look for onboarders, we make sure they're active accounts and have been on hive longer. Some times there are people who try to sign up for an onboarder position while still being new to hive or barely being active at all themselves (no active posts/comments/curation). The position as an onboarder comes with a lot of trust and there should be room for "consequences" if they purposely abuse their position, such as ruining their reputation on chain or facing downvotes if they've maliciously been onboarding fake users/alt accounts, etc since in their position they can also nominate posts of new users for curation.

Thus, our acceptance requirements are a bit stricter.

We also look at geolocation, someone wanting to onboard people from quite a random place that there's not many of on here may find it harder to retent those users and the effects may not be as great for the onboarding attempts or for those users to find "their people" on here which helps retention. If the onboarder qualifies in other ways however we always give them the chance anyway but we do prefer onboarders who are from the "high focus geolocations" that already are present on hive, think venezuela, ghana, nigeria, philippines, indonesia, etc.

The idea there of course is that if you're getting somewhere new, especially on a social media platform, you're more likely to stick around if you see/find people you may already know or you have an easier time getting to know and build a connection with. We hope that this could at some point cause some form of a ripple effect where say a big amount of users from the same town/city happen to be on hive and they go out and start onboarding users on their own rather than through an onboarding initiative.

Something that needs to be said and is also important are initiatives like #spendhbd, if we start seeing a lot of users from the same place on hive, it'd make sense if they started onboarding merchants to accept hbd/hive since many users would be more likely to spend their rewards directly rather than going through unnecessary fees and hoops to convert to fiat.

Another thing that's important to note is that all these activities and initiatives are made possible with small author rewards through compilation posts through @ocdb and beneficiary settings that hiveonboard places. While it isn't much, it's a little something for those spending countless hours attempting to onboard users to hive. I share this post as well where we take a deeper look at our onboarding stats with the help of @hivetrending fetching the data.

The plans from my side would be that eventually we could maybe start sweetening the deal up a bit more with additional reward pool generated rewards to incentivize a focus on onboarding even more than it is currently, where most onboarders are just doing it for fun rather than for the rewards. These plans would also be to focus on the same locations as most of our previous onboarding and to then maybe also tackle some unique new "marketing" approaches that'd go hand in hand with the previous onboarding activities. I'll talk abit more about this later as this post already got quite long.

If you're an experienced and active hiver who knows how this place works and you feel like you have a lot of people you know that you'd wanna invite to hive, feel free to apply for an onboarder role in our discord and test things out. Even if you only end up onboarding a few people, odds are some of them may stick around for the long term looking at our statistics.

If you have some ideas that'd make our onboarding activities more efficient or if you generally would like to help with retention/curation of these users, we can guide you in the right way of where to look and appreciate you spending your time for the growth of the userbase on chain!

Thanks for reading.