Where this actually started
Every Tuesday since March of last year I have sat in the Hive Discord with 
Hive struggles to keep its peeps. And we don't get that many real peeps to begin with.
So here is what a year of listening boiled down to for me.
Onboarding is often an awkward and painful experience. While the actual act of getting an account has improved. It’s the next bit that is discombobulated.
You get your account, but what do you actually do? what to do, where to go, who to talk to, how to behave. Those questions get different answers by the dozen. Hive has a hundred little details and from the inside on day one it can feel like a wall. A big digital wilderness, leaving many confused and alone in it. You post a few times into a void of seeming silence and you leave.
And the void is not just a feeling, it's in the data.
| Your first post got... | Still here at 90 days | Still here at one year |
|---|---|---|
| no reply at all | 27% | 5% |
| a reply from a human | 37% | 9% |
| a human and a bot both | 56% | 18% |
In 2017 four out of five new people got a reply to their first post, usually inside ten minutes. By 2024 it was under half, and the typical wait was over two and a half hours. Silence is the strongest predictor of leaving. The first two or three human replies do most of the work.
The last years Hive makes around fifty thousand new accounts a year. Five out of six accounts are gone before anyone said hello.
Meanwhile there are plenty of OG users who would happily reply, vote, show someone around. Yet they often don't, and I get why. Finding a real new person means trawling the feeds, and on any given day there are probably more bullshit accounts than real ones. It’s simply a tedious task. Bots, sock puppets, farms, people who joined only to siphon. Let’s say your motivated and go looking to support some newbs, thats an hour of life gone in search of the elusive real human that found hive out of interest and is not here only to leech. It’s easy to see why people stick to their own circle, some may call it circle jerking, but its really a safety thing for a lot of us, i dont want to squander that precious reward pool to unknowns.
Here sits 2 clear hive retention issues, and they feed right into each other. It’s easy for a legit new user to slip though the cracks and even hive veterans struggle finding real new users. This shit ain’t easy. The new user gets no answer and the OG user finds nobody worth answering. Nobody's specific fault. It is just how the current Hive cookie crumbles.
And it is this catch 22 that birthed the Basecamp idea in my head. An attempt at a 2 birds 1 stone solution.
So i could see this problem like many did and do, and we could talk around it debating solutions, but i wernt no dev,🤠 I couldn't build it.
Then all of a sudden our sci-fi dystopian AI robot future descended, and now a simple Butt like me could say fuck it, let me take a stab at fixing the broken front door. Handyman Ho!
Everything i have built is using Denser and designed behind a button at the top of hive.blog …right next to the our dapps button at the top of hive.blog home page.
First idea: a plankton pond. Ie. One feed, every new user post in one place. Only accounts under a year old all in the same spot.
On every post, a card. Not a verdict, facts the chain already knows: age, activity, who made the account, how much of its writing is copy paste, whether it only talks to bots or votes for itself, what hours it writes, KE, how much it earned and cashed out. Curators decide. The tool doesn't.
The idea is to gamify the whole first year, both sides of it. The card that sits next to the post is like a mirror. An OG user reads it to decide whether to support you. You see the same card, next to ones that look better, so you go do real things: intro post, follow, vote, reply, a real back and forth, a community post, a power up. Each fills a ring from your actual chain history. Can't be faked. Making your card look better is learning the place and proving you're human.
Then interests, up to five on public record, serving to aid an algorithm and to get matched to an OG user who offered to guide. Guide, not mentor. Lighter word, more people hopefully will offer.
Then games, because useful isn't fun. Spotting bots is a skill, and skills make good games. Puppet Patrol, a suite of future games that work as a kind of community swarm hivewatchers, making policing the chain fun. with game names like, bot or not, circle the jerk, whack-a-mole scammer slammer, and the first one i made that actually plays, Bugger. Bugger is just me having some simple fun. I personally cant get past level 3, you can jump to any level if you want a challenge. Go play it 👆
The first few weeks I was building with my own Claude Pro account and was just hitting the token limits constantly. Then 
Boom, one month of Claude Max. That is the whole budget for everything below. Small money, and it changed the job anyway. Before, I was building something because I wanted it to exist. After it was dhf backed and now I felt that real community hook.
I estimate during this month of Claude Max im 100+ hours, though I didn't run a timer.
Before the list: none of this is deployed. It runs on my machine. What follows is a month of work, not a launch.
What got built 3 to 12 Aug, Basecamp. Plankton pond, interests, guide offers, the card and its rings. Bugger the playable game and my boy Percy the guinea pig.
14 to 24 Aug, the big picture game… H.I.V.E.R. Thirty-five passes in ten days. Think Zelda style adventure explore gameplay, but the world is Hive lore and the game also functions as a front end. A red bug on a surfboard riding the topology of the Hive logo, where you encounter real live posts along your path and top 21 witness citadels protecting the land, all real and clickable. The evil Emperor J SON, sending his malicious critters out to steal, kidnap and slow players down, the Steem Ruins, your face riding the bug.
Nothing is carved in stone yet. The Card provides Indicators, not conclusions. Only blockchain facts about a person. The reader decides how to interpret. Hive History become terrain in the H.I.V.E.R. game. The 2020 fork is the Steem Ruins, a rusted rail that stops with future ideas for a place of banishment. 21 hidden helmets that give extra air for space leaps and a DHF Fun Park.
For the developers
37 days, 21 with commits, 101 commits, 250 files, +32,768 / −809 lines, 39 tickets, 26 resolved.
H.I.V.E.R. 18,003 lines in 110 files.
Basecamp 5,520 in 56.
About 100 hours, estimated.
One month of Claude Max
30 headless checks, one command, no browser.
Code: github.com/HIVE-Basecamp/denser, branch feat/basecamp-activity-rings-and-games.
Every session started with ETHOS.md. Which can be summed up as a commitment to being fun and providing a gamified experience of the hive blockchain. Open source to the core and meant to be taken and shared by any front end or developer, built to be constantly changed, and to show facts about a new user without ever deciding for the curator what they mean.
Anyone is welcome to fork basecamp or H.I.V.E.R. None of this is deployed, its not dev reviewed, not proven fun, and there are no live players yet. The drawing code has no checks beyond my eyes.
My daily question… is it fun??
My goal, an easily pluggable SDK that any front end can try, a dev review to make sure its not dog food code.
What would be my ultimate measure of success, my son Percy choosing to play because he wants to, not because i asked him to test it. Hasn’t happened yet.
Should I keep building this? Am i wasting my time and DHF funds? What do you think?
This post is rewarded by 
This post was AI assisted …what does that mean. Well i asked Claude to got back through my GitHub repo and the Basecamp project and write a post about all the things we did during our 1 month of Claude Max Subscription. Then i spent about 3 hours fucking editing it so it was fully me and accurately presented my thoughts and motivations.