Thanks for your input. To my knowledge, there is no reliable way of tracking users once they leave Hive. In the mainstream world this is often done by tracking cookies, email and other related options. We don't have any of that on Hive as a general rule - though some UIs do collect Email addresses. We do not have access to any data that can track users beyond that, which is by design and really is a selling point.

This obviously poses a significant challenge when it comes to marketing and user retention, since the majority of mainstream strategies fail immediately as a result.

The only way we can capture data on users that don't sign up after landing on the landing pages, who get stuck or who don't come back is to provide extremely clear and user friendly feedback systems that feed into a central repository of data that everyone can access. I very rarely see anything like that anywhere online, since it is mostly commercial businesses that are motivated to optimise their UX to that extent and they don't make such results public. So we need to develop a unified system to handle this. Exploring this and finding solutions is ideally going to be a small part of this proposal.

There are good systems that can be installed by dApp operators which will record all of the user's movements and can even allow them to record realtime audio commentary as they use the site (the system makes it simple for analysts to then review the recordings efficiently later on). These can be opted-into in order to protect privacy. This is a necessary step towards UX improvements in a growing system in today's climate.

Focus groups could be organised by running a custom Ecency instance and installing the user tracking software I mentioned, so there's no need to get agreement from dApp operators for that to work - but we still need to isolate and source the audience/users for that process to work in a meaningful way.

In terms of finding sufficient survey respondents, the questions would be designed in ways that enable us to collect data whether people know about Steem/Hive or not. There would be questions for people who do already know about Hive, but it is likely that targeting people who know about Hive but who don't use it, will be costly. Also, from my own experience, it's clear to me that the vast majority of people who do know about Hive but who don't use it, have big misunderstandings about it due to 'errors' that constantly get published by 'journalists' on the topic.

We are flexible and would likely change our approach based on initial survey findings, but at this point I imagine we will mainly frame questions in ways that gather the needed data without needing the outside individuals to have much knowledge of Hive. We may have success in finding people who really know about Hive but who don't use it, but we can't know if this will be a sufficient number without starting the process.

I am not aware of any market research ever being published in the entire history of either Steem or Hive, so yes, we have no reliable info on the growth of Steem or its failing - beyond our own observations and experiences. I have a few theories and some parts are fairly obvious, but I do know that it has always been hard to get anyone to use Hive/Steem if I approach them on web 2, even people I know well and who would like Hive! This has been challenging to understand, but in my circles the reasons for not using Hive or leaving quickly almost always include one or more of:

• Don't have time / too difficult to learn.
• Audience too small, not worth it.
• Crypto is a scam.
• It's not really uncensored, it's just a facade designed to look like it is, but really it's just a different form of the information control we see on web 2.

In terms of why Steem was so successful, I personally think that it's a combination of:

• First mover advantage (novelty).
• The COMMUNITY of users who were often anarcho capitalists and visionary thinkers - creating interesting discussion and opportunity.
• A spirit of creativity and openness.

At this point, so few people have heard of Steem or Hive (allowing DeSo to literally lie and claim that they are the first decentralised social network), that Hive kind of still has a first mover advantage if it were to apply the right strategy to exploit its position.

The creative anarcho minds have mostly left Hive at this point, frustrated with the policies that were put in place at its inception. I know some of them and they are planning to launch competitors to Hive themselves in some cases.

It's difficult to quantify accurately how all of these factors directly impact growth in an ever changing global landscape, but I don't think its impossible to repeat or exceed Steemit's success - however, imo, stakeholders need to understand the world audience much better than at present.