I know this question goes against the community rules but seeing as this community is pretty much dead I figured I'd bring some life to it with this post. (please check rules for future posts if you want to post into it)
A lot has changed ever since the Hive fork. In the past there were a lot of issues for onboarding, people either got their friends to join and then they weren't cared for enough, or they joined and couldn't find their place. I think things have changed a lot since then and for the better.
Communities are a big part of it, being able to find a community for things you are interested in, being welcomed not just by the people who onboarded you but also by projects and groups incentivized to look out for you is a good way to get newcomers to stick around and check what Hive has to offer.
Another great addition to the onboarders is that we have referral links now that do make it worth your while to onboard and guide the newcomers to get started and started properly with Hive. Peakd and Hiveonboard both offer referral links that send the onboarder 3% beneficiaries on posts and comments made by the new user (until the new user removes the settings), but since many are just happy to be here and they're here thanks to their onboarder they don't mind the beneficiary rewards in the beginning. Now 3% is not much but if you think about influencers or if you have a lot of friends who would fit well with Hive it would add up over time, especially with curation projects doing their job well.
I can't speak much for all other projects on Hive but I know we at @ocd are working quite hard to make sure retention goes up and users are directed towards many unique niche communities we've attempted to help grow and prosper over the years. While we also have our own dedicated onboarding project with a growing amount of onboarders and new users joining as can be tracked through the @ocdb posts, I wonder what's stopping people from onboarding people they know through other means nowadays, even without referral links incentives given that accounts are still being offered for free.
Is it the learning curve? Is it the lack of voting power you have at your disposal?
Either way, just curious about it.
Social media needs users to thrive, everything else comes after in my opinion. Knowing what I know about Hive and feedback being given to me from those who join and stick around it has all mostly up to 99% been positive compared to #web2 so I'm merely curious why it's not creating a chain effect of people onboarding, onboarded users eventually onbaording others, etc?
It's kind of weird but at this point I would've imagined we'd have issues scaling in the front of account creation with users having to pay 3 hive for an account and considering many other platforms or fake #web3 ones having a much higher cost of entry it just kind of leaves me a bit baffled over why we're not seeing this influx.
We're also thinking about the #web2.5 connection we'd want to bring to Hive that may bypass the headaches of going through account creation and key management for newcomers so they can instantly start using Hive and later on decide to create/buy their real immutable account. Finishing some things on that front to get a proposal out to get it built which I hope others will support and see the value in it, some of it having been discussed in this post of mine some time ago but lately having been improved in collaboration with @threespeak. I mention this so the answers wouldn't be the usual "account creation is too difficult/hassle" as we already know about this being kind of a roadblock for some people.
Feel free to speak your mind, given what you say we'd happily adjust/improve our initiatives towards making them better as well.
Thanks for reading.
