How do we get content creators to give Hive a try? What can we tell people?
How do we do that without attracting bad actors and spammers?
Putting in the work
Marky had a great post about the need to put the work in. Within the comments I mentioned how some topics are still under-represented, and because other topics are far more popular, and more highly rewarded, that is a catch-22.
We need to attract fresh blood, but how?
Cash rules everything around me
Obviously, while Hive is pumpin' that is the obvious draw, but money motivation alone would cause extra spam-farmers and bot activity.
Plus, if you come here expecting instant sums of money then you might soon get disheartened unless you very quickly attract attention.
SEO Benefits
I hesitate to talk about SEO benefits outside of here because they are going to attract SEO spam, and also they are hard to measure.
CMS Backend?
One thing I mentioned to Marky was having a web front end with your own domain name - use the blogging tools as a CMS backend. It seems from the little research I have done that some people had the same idea. If those sites perform well, and the process is easy, then that could attract people.
After all, WordPress is approaching 45% of the active web, in part due to the ease of site-building and content creation.
Having said that, those people would be using the engine but not participating in the community, so not adding a lot to our goal in this particular conversation.
Getting off of Twitter
Micro-blogging is another avenue, but as several people complain (often justified) about noise rather than valuable content, that would be counterproductive in many cases too.
3Speak versus Twitch/YouTube
As a video service for people who are not happy with YouTube, 3Speak is a good tool. Unfortunately, because it attracts people who are unhappy with YouTube, like many of the "alternatives" to the big players, it is full of things that regular folks are turned off by.
No legitimate content creators will want to associate their brand with the fringe/conspiracy/flat-earth things if they want to be around for a long time.
Newsletters
It is quite possible to hook up an email service with your feed. Just like using services here as a web backend, you could use it as a source of your newsletter.
Again, the problem would be the interaction would be taking place off-service, and it would be Hive as a database. Not a bad thing, but not a community-builder either.
Small proposal - Expanding the communities
The one idea that I think has some potential is based off of the work Marky has done with STEMGeeks.
When I look at the places I hang out the most, and where I create the most content-value in a day, it is the communities.
- Facebook keeps me engaged despite my dislike for Facebook with the groups
- I am in several forums
- When I look for something highly specific in the maker topic, it is often Hackaday community posts that pop up
- My business partner and I pay $80/mo for Circle community platform
- Reddit, of course, dominates in terms of eyeballs for certain content
- Most Patreon campaigns, Twitch-streamers, and YouTube channels hook up with Discord rather than keep the conversation on that platform (and Discord, being more "chat" than forum, has its own difficulties)
The best part is nothing needs to be added to Hive, just the existing features would need to be carefully used to not annoy the community but add to it.
What do you think?
Am I off-base?
Would it annoy the existing community?
Can you think of anything we can do quickly to test the hypothesis?