Hey everyone!
First off, I want to let you all know that this'll start of as an experiment. We'll see how it goes for a few weeks and decide further after that how well it's received and the effects of it. Truth be told we've attempted to do another onboarding initiative in the past but it was more of a closed circle with few people attempting to do so, it started off well but interest dropped off and other things started to happen at that time that overshadowed it.
Now we're at a point with Hive where this can be done platform wide and I'm going to tell you why I believe that and what measures we're thinking of taking to prevent any sort of abuse.
Referral rewards
In the past we relied mostly on post rewards of compilation posts highlighting the new content creators/users that were onboarded as content to generate rewards for the efforts of the onboarders. Now with @hiveonboard and @peakd offering referral rewards I think this will be another added incentive to get out there and get new users onto Hive. If you haven't used Hiveonboard.com yet, I'd highly recommend you go, login with keychain and check it out. I tested it the other week and it worked like a charm for the person signing up.
The website is great, the "referred accounts" section shows you data like beneficiary % from accounts you've added, their RC condition and activity. Similar to Hiveonboard @peakd now also has this feature if you go to "tools" and then "my referrals" you'll find yourself on this page.
Something you may notice straight off the bat is that peakd.com let's you set the beneficiary cut yourself, but for this initiative we're recommending max 10%. Remember that this is something the new user can remove at any time.
One of the incentives would be the beneficiary rewards for this initiative. Granted they get curation, read more about how we want to deal with that part and at the same time avoid abuse.
Post rewards
On top of the referral/beneficiary rewards for the onboarded users and "guaranteed curation" on their first posts, we'd also want to offer post rewards to sweeten the deal. Posts about the initiative would not be repetitive copy-pasted spam, though and require some additional work from our side once a week. No one wants to see the same (this post for instance) on trending once per week and automation to receive that much rewards. What we propose instead is that after this first week we'd start doing compilation posts highlighting some of the new signups. A short description after reading their introduction posts or what they like to post about with images of their accounts and links so that our readers and the trending attention can see if it's users they'd be interested in following and supporting on their Hive journey.
Some of the post rewards would go to the authors compiling as that may take effort but the rest would be left to reward the referrers the next week.
Avoiding abuse
As you may have been thinking at this point already, people are going to try and abuse this through sockpuppets and identity theft. For this the only solution we think is necessary is that the referrer asks the new sign up to also include a link in their first post/or a comment under it to one of their socials where they have been active stating that "@username" is their Hive account. This has been one of the main ways I've been able to verify newcomers to avoid an identity thief from pretending to be someone they're not. There's nothing worse than a legit creator later finding out someone's been profiting off of their work.
We realize that this is an extra kind of annoying step that may shoo off new signups but I think just mentioning the way rewards work and how fast newcomers can earn their first crypto here and that identity theft is often involved they'll understand why this is necessary.
Anyway, as mentioned this'll be an experiment so let's see how it goes!
TL;DR
Invite new users to Hive
Use a referral link if you like
Give them some HP or tell us in a comment here when they've created an account if you can't delegate HP to them yourself
Post their first post in a comment here so we can curate it
Tell them to add a link to a comment on their previous social media site where they verify that this is indeed their Hive account
Send them over to our Discord if they have more questions and you don't have time
Earn these post rewards + guaranteed beneficiary rewards
Keep it going
Let us know what you think and if you have any ideas on how to improve upon this, we'd gladly hear you out and appreciate it.