Today I onboarded a friend who has a lot of original content to contribute in the fields of spirituality, tantra and travelling. We are sitting together in Mexico and I suggested to use @ecency's service to create the account (as I like the app on Android phones). Sad part is that the process failed with bogus "IP score to low" or similar messages. We even tried a German mobile Hotspot to get a "better" IP than the Mexican landline dialup IP. This did not work, same error message.
A little annoyed, I then used an account creation token of my stash and the nerdy sign-the-transaction-myself method - luckily my account is big enough and I use a python script since ages to stack them whenever my RCs are full enough. Still, the experience of onboarding was bad, even years after HIVE's inception. If you need to sit next to a dolphin to get in free, platform growth will continue to be slow and the circle of HIVEers stay elite. Most users probably give up, especially if they are new to the whole crypto ecosystem.
So dear @ecency, please check your spam protection features. A recommendation would be to take into account the quality of the referring account and drop some bogus IP checks if that is good.
Is there a need for a good free onboarding solution? To my mind, it needs to be
- permissionless (no phone validation or other KYC)
- spam protection by methods of game theory (example: "invite" signed and published as custom json by an existing trusted/active member of the community regardless of HP; rate limits)
- free as in beer (no need to have crypto for an easy entry for newcomers; this is not about money but simplicity, nothing wrong with charging for an account in general)
- easy and secure as in a simple web wizard
If this is something not only I find important, I might put up a small proposal. It could be a dedicated account that gets RC's delegated to pile up account creation tokens plus a little webapp that handles signups.
What do you think? Does something like this already exist and I just don't know?