Adventures in Onboarding

Some of you know I've been fiddling around with a new onboarding scheme. Basically, I'm openly advertising Hive on Steem. 😎

The "hard part" was getting Steemit, Inc. to let me do this. Turns out, a really important first step is to get blocked.

Now that I'm blocked, they mostly leave me alone and I can do what I want over there. They have noticed me, but their solution is to downvote me and also reply to my posts with a warning. But the warning cannot be seen because they blocked me and no replies show.

Therefore, I'm free to continue my shenanigans. To recap, here's what I typically do:

• I'm running a block follower (drphil) to upvote everyone on Steem who posts for the very first time.
  • This is key because it focuses on folks who really don't have much of a time investment in Steem yet and it avoids the folks that do.
  • This gets my name in the post as the top voter, typically.
• The author sees my name and will follow my Steem account, about 7% of the time.
  • Which means when the author goes to their /feed page to see posts by the folks they follow, it will include me, due to an oversight in Steemit, Inc.'s blocking mechanism.
• I will occasionally post (taunt) in my Steem communities because it lets me pin them for later reference.
  • These posts will show in follower feeds, regardless of if I pin them.

With all of the above going on, I could just walk away from it and let my block follower upvote indefinitely. The upshot is, for every 14-15 upvotes I cast, one of those upvotes will get a follow and I don't have to do anything.

When they follow me, I can tell them what I want to tell them. Usually, I just post memes and other stuff that highlights the problems with Steem. I don't really have to keep posting because the bug in their blocking mechanism means that none of my historical posts will show in my follower feeds, only my critical ones after being blocked do.

Y U Do Dis?

Does this really lead to Hive sign-ups? It appears to, yes. Comparing my account history (votes cast) and corresponding new accounts on Hive, I'm seeing a 1% vote-to-sign-up rate. If you do the same kind of comparison for existing accounts, meaning after my vote on Steem, how many accounts are then active on Hive, it's about 2%.

These are the accounts that just so happened to join after my Steem upvote (may or may not be correlated):

created	last post	new account
2021-04-28 20:22:00 UTC		@mr-elephantpapa
2021-04-29 08:32:03 UTC		@rukazax
2021-04-30 11:22:03 UTC		@roliz
2021-04-30 19:38:54 UTC	2021-05-07 23:18:18 UTC	@dexigneer
2021-05-02 07:02:33 UTC	2021-05-12 14:24:06 UTC	@aco5
2021-05-02 10:54:03 UTC		@limetoken
2021-05-07 01:40:03 UTC	2021-05-10 18:22:27 UTC	@dehirry
2021-05-08 23:59:36 UTC		@angry-man
2021-05-09 08:22:03 UTC	2021-05-11 09:17:39 UTC	@shahidkalwani
2021-05-10 01:03:03 UTC	2021-05-11 13:05:48 UTC	@zology69
2021-05-10 03:15:03 UTC	2021-05-12 02:23:24 UTC	@siddharthruhil
2021-05-11 14:44:03 UTC		@qzl521
2021-05-11 17:39:54 UTC	2021-05-12 15:36:00 UTC	@olachi
2021-05-11 23:15:03 UTC		@misnely
2021-05-12 00:28:12 UTC	2021-05-12 00:42:48 UTC	@gannzo67
2021-05-12 02:06:12 UTC	2021-05-12 02:45:06 UTC	@travler07
2021-05-12 12:08:03 UTC	2021-05-12 12:27:57 UTC	@pitsaboy

Obviously, these are not huge numbers. But it's something. And I know there's no guarantee it had anything to do with my block follower. It could just be uncorrelated sign-ups by folks who intended to join both chains anyway.

Even if that's the case, it's still interesting.