Before I say anything else, I'd like to point out that the 15% active retention rate is a pretty impressive number by most web forum standards. I say that as somebody who has been moderating, admined and even started a number of web forums/communities going back all the way to 1995. We often operated by a 20-10-5 rule, meaning that if 20% of sign ups said something once in a while, 10% said something regularly, and 5% were active enough to suggest the forum to even one of their friends we were doing a bang up job. One a more typical scale, I have a Facebook niche community with 19K followers/members and if we hear from 150-200 people a month, that's a massive win.

People throw around a lot of ideas with respect to getting more people to join Hive. As a nine year old venue, it often seems to me that we'd be better served by sharing individual corners of Hive rather than Hive as a generality. Also, let's keep in mind that nobody else thinks Hive is nearly as cool as those of us who have poured 8-9 years into this place do.

This all goes back to taking a closer look at how people use the web. You don't really hear too much about people who are just "on Facebook," or "on TikTok," or "on X/Twitter." They do or follow very specific things on those platforms, meaning that you are coincidentally on Facebook because you are part of a Facebook gardening group or gaming group, for example.

I have a feeling that pitching Hive purely as a blogging or content creation venue leaves is with a relatively small niche. Consider, for example, how Splinterlands was — at one time — the biggest driver of new accounts, but not because of Hive; because of a game. The draw was the game, not Hive.

We have not really done a great job of building strong interest based communities within the hive ecosystem, and I think that may be part of the challenge in obtaining new members.

Personally, I have primarily shared Hive as a one-on-one pitch to people I knew were bloggers are writers. Sadly, none of the people who actually made accounts are active. Their primary reasons have been (1) it's too complicated and (2) they didn't like the idea of content that was only monetized for a week. And I honestly can’t disagree with those two as objective obstacles.

Having incentives for people to be "Hive evangelists" in terms encouraging people to join the community is great, but there must also be an active system to make those signups feel like they have really "become part of something;" from contests only for newbies, to "minnow-building" initiatives, to... remember "newbie re-$t33m Day" once a week?