The last few weeks have been nice. We are finally free from the clutches of tyrants and lazy captains. We’ve done a good job at bring the community over. But it seems a majority of people here are still acting as if they are not personally responsible for the future of this ecosystem....
Hive has no CEO.
Hive is not run by a company or corporation.
Hive has the potential to become one of the most decentralized chains out there as well as one with the most utility.
We are set to spread far and do great things. There is one thing we all need to remember though:
We are steering the ship ourselves now
No CEO or company means Hive members are responsible for the success of Hive and no one else will come along to make anything happen. Hive won’t just succeed on its own, it won’t even survive with a bunch of developers working away, it needs a community wide effort.
If we don't do our best to grow this place, it will fall apart.
We can't wait for someone else to come along and do it.
A few developments here and there may help.
A listing may bring a few people over.
#posh is a great effort and certainly helps and everyone should do it, but we need a whole lot more than a few hashtags.
We need a lot more people to do their part to grow this place, otherwise, it isn't going to last.
I say that, still confident that it WILL last, but we are treading on thin ice here. It may not feel like it but we are. If we get lazy the next few months, we will miss our best chance to grow and return to our highest amount of users and engagement.
Everyone feels good about Hive being listed and beating steem in many ways, but we won’t get many chances to ride on momentum. The first wave of momentum is dying down already.
What the hell are we waiting for?
Are we waiting for steem to make a comeback with some sleazy Justin tweets and airdrop offers? Are we waiting for Facebook to untangle it’s libra coin and give us much harder competition than we have had before? Are we waiting for some new unofficial CEO to come along and save us? Are we waiting for the witnesses and developers to do everything for us?
If that’s the case, we don’t deserve decentralization.
But I say we do deserve it, we just need a little kick in the butt and so that’s what I hope to do with this post. We need to collectively decide to step up and make it happen. There is one essentially way we are falling short...
Onboarding new quality users
This should be the absolute priority now. No questions asked. We don’t need massive numbers overnight.
We need steady growth.
I frequently look at @penguinpablo's posts to see how many active members we have, and I'm disappointed by the numbers. 10,000 was a nice number to start with. We made it up to 13,000 and fell backdown to 11,000 and now we are stuck in that 11k-12k range.
That’s the best we could do from news about being listed by binance and Huobi? Give me a break!
We can’t rely on headlines alone, we need to make an active effort.
Remember all the outreach that was going on at steem back in the day? We need to do exactly that and we all need to take part.
Here is a list of ideas to bring new users onboard. You can put as much or as little effort into it as you like but if you put no effort into it, you are discouraging Hives success.
Growing the local Hive communities
One of the strongest things Steem had going for it back in the day was local steem communities. We didn’t even have a communities function but groups all over the world were organizing through tags and discord groups. We should be putting a huge effort into this. We should be building Hive groups in every country with a large population, in every major city.
I am personally taking the initiative to connect and encourage coordination between these communities through the Language and Culture Exchange community.
We can build strong nodes around the world and then build different channels of coordination and connection between them. Let’s make it happen.
Local Meetups
Obviously the corona situation makes this a little hard right now but once we have stronger communities based around local areas, we will be ready to have meetups as soon as our area calms down. Every country in North, Central and South America, major hubs all over Africa, Asia, Australia and Europe. We can start with the ones which already have some numbers.
At meetups each Hivesters can be encouraged to bring one non-Hivester friend. This worked in the past.
Growing Smaller Communities
A lot of people complain about all the Hive related content on Hive, but with a relatively small user base of a few thousand people and with so much power to influence the place ourselves, it makes sense. The fact is, most niches aren't developed enough for us to get good engagement on niche posts. Photography does well, Crypto does well, Natural Medicine is doing ok. There are a few others that a pushing on despite little support, but most communities have only a handful of active users. We need to change this.
We should be onboarding people and inviting them straight to a community that fits their interests and preferably a community that is still struggling to grow. They will be much more likely to stay and find the whole experience comfortable.
I would love to have more people promoting our Language exchange Community.
We should have much stronger communities built around sports, gaming, anime, philosophy, fiction, music, and a whole other myriad of things. These won't grow themselves though. It's totally up to YOU and ME.
Mention some communities in the pitch!
Get busy on YouTube and Twitter
There are a ton of people sick of traditional social media right now. I don’t even need to go into why, everyone knows. Many people are scared to lose their following and lose touch with old friends though. We can’t expect everyone to abandon it all right away. We need to let them ease in and invite their friends over slowly. And not everyone has to join us either, we just want to catch all those who may bring something to the ecosystem or those who will sincerely benefit from it.
Some have tried steem and were disappointed by some of its many many problems. But we are better than Steem ever was now. We need to get back to pushing on social media with more than just tags.
Hashtags are good but they are not enough. Whenever someone mentions being demonetized or censored, we should be recommending Hive. Even when people don’t mention anything like that, we should be mentioning Hive. “You’d fit in great at Hive.blog!”
Comment! Every single one of us who believes in the platform should be doing this. Even if you hate Twitter, sign up just to do this twice a day to some influencers or friends or strangers you respect on twitter or YouTube. Any niche is welcome. Choose your favorites.
Don’t avoid traditional social media
I haven’t cut ties with everyone who is on traditional social media. I still want to connect with them. And when I do it makes it easier to bring others to Hive.
I am organizing Facebook communities around various topics now, and while other people are trying to market towards them to make a profit, I am going to be recommending Hive to them.
People aren’t going to leave a platform where all their friends and favorite people are, don’t expect them to. Get their foot in the door first and eventually they start putting more time into this place and convince their friends to come over.
Ease people into it
One of the biggest failures I see with onboarding is when people want it too much. You can’t expect everyone to come over, and the more you push, the LESS likely they will be to come over. That’s how human psychology works. People need to make their own decisions to do things otherwise they don’t feel any real commitment.
The best way to do this is to mention Hive casually to friends. “What did you do today?” “I was working on a big project about ______ at Hive. “What’s hive?”
That’s how onboarding should start. Not “hey do you wanna make money!” “hey they powers that be are fucking everything up come join the revolution!” Pique their interest rather than shoving it down their throat.
Send the best articles to your friends when it’s a topic they are interested in. Share your favorite Hive art. Talk about your Hive friends (this one always works best for me). “Why do you have friends in Venezuela?” “Hive”. “What’s that?”
Mention money once they’re already interested
This is such an important point to not only attracting people with more to contribute, but encouraging the best contributions from anyone at Hive. Save the monetization for the K.O. If they already seem interested and then you mention “oh and also, I made $5 for that post”, that is way more powerful than starting with that.
We should be bringing back old steemians to Hive
We can be elitist if we want and fault people for leaving, or we can be honest with ourselves and admit that steem was a total fuck show for over a year. As much as people say everyone left because crypto crashed, I personally know far more people who left because it felt like a spam-fest and bidbots delivered a final blow for them.
We need to reach out to whoever we liked and tell them “no more bidbots, no more ceo, more decentralized than ever, communities up and running, fewer spam, fewer scams, wtf are you doing not on Hive? We miss you”
@guyfawkes4-20 @loftee @satorid @stellabelle @churdtzu and a bunch of others have reappeared recently and their presence brings a renewed sense of excitement to Hive. If we could bring back just a fraction of our old users (some of the best), we’d double our current user base.
Make the most of discord
When friends are interested, you can invite them to your favorite discord even before they are signed up. That way any questions they have can be answered by the community and they can get to know people so they have a few friends to start.
I am organizing chats related to my work and to Facebook groups and then I can bring those people over to the most fitting Hive related chat on discord whenever they seem a little interested.
Come up with your own ways to onboard new quality users
Share in the comments, post about it. Talk about it. Don’t just let the idea rot away in your brain.
Take care of the people you onboard
Let them know how important engagement is, help them make friends, give them upvotes and shares when they post good stuff. Give them tips for writing better content.
COMMENT! I feel like some people think a vote is enough to keep people here. People like money but if they don’t receive any comments they feel they are writing into the void and they stop caring and eventually leave.
Diversify our communities
As more people come to the platform, we are going to need to expand our list of popular communities and they should revolved more around shared interests because it helps people to find their place in the community. I really appreciate the curation communities, but if that’s all we have, there isn’t much of a point to communities. I try to post in a variety of communities and cycle through them depending on what topic I am sharing. For my “#30daysof Indonesian” Study blog I go back and forth between the language exchange community, Indonesian community, ocd, and others. This exposes different people to my project and supports a wider variety of communities. For anyone posting in our language exchange community I also encourage them to post in the community for that language or culture sometimes to help keep that community strong.
If we build our communities, new members will have a place to feel welcome!