Humble Suggestion for Growing Hive

There are a lot of well-funded projects with a common aim of growing Hive.

I'm not going to get into the effectiveness of those other than to put forward in one place my concept for an approach that would

1. Be more effective.
2. Require less overhead.
3. Would be almost entirely fully refundable if it doesn't work out for any reason.

Why would it be more effective? Because

1. It uses successful strategies already working right now outside of Hive.
2. Attracted users would be incentivized to stick around. They would also be less likely to be put off.
3. Most of the infrastructure and content is already here.

That second one is a key piece I think a lot of Hive misses. There are a lot of people out there who have only so much attention to give, and therefore want a highly curated niche experience for things they are super passionate about.

Don't believe me? Test for yourself, go to a subreddit, forum, or Facebook group about a niche topic, and post about, say, politics. You will get either cautioned or thrown out.

The Idea

My idea is to take one or two communities from Hive and give them standalone websites under branded domains, but still keep them as Hive under the hood.

You could do a whole bunch of them for a lot less $ than a Rally car or any of the other projects, plus being a combination of web2 and web3, there would be real-time stats using trusted third-party tools to see everything going on.

Why Front-Ends

1. Brandable with domains, keeps to focused niche topic, and community identity
2. Technical benefit, organic traffic, can include code and added functionality or even monetization
3. Greatly simplifies user experience (they don't even need to know about crypto or Hive until it makes sense for them).

$

The most extreme bootstrapped version of this doesn't even need funding at all but of course, would take a lot more time and effort to see results.

These websites would have the regular costs associated with any website, hosting, domain, and so on. I would anticipate a community of a reasonable size would attract enough support in terms of votes, curation, tips, and delegation that would more than be covered but others would likely know better than me.

Some communities (eg @brofund and @stemgeeks) already have websites of various kinds.

In my idealized version, most of the "investment" would be to reward great content (which can be done with upvotes, but the greater the reward the higher the motivation) or compensate for time (eg. editor/code/admin).

With an advertising budget the whole thing can be accelerated, and using online advertising obviously allows for community oversight for where the money is going and the return on that investment.

All custom code would be open source and therefore useful for all communities or future projects.

A version of this can all be done by individual communities now just with some volunteer time. My WordPress plugin can pull in your community content into a front-end website on a domain already.

The next level up would be encouraging, incentivizing, and rewarding great content creators. Again, they do not need to know about Hive necessarily. Sharing rewards out of a central pot would be the most transparent option, based on agreed metrics.

Over to you

Someone is going to do this, maybe even someone on Hive, and there are a lot more ideas around this as a foundation, but I wanted to get the core idea planted today.

What do you think?