After a lot of thought and planning we're finally ready to announce our onboarding program we've been working on. In this post I'll be explaining what it is exactly, how it will run and why and I'm hoping to have a lot of trusted stakeholders apply to be part of our onboarding program after careful vetting to make sure we'll be able to provide some of the best numbers the chain may have ever seen before.
I'll be trying to explain my thoughts that went into this as well as I can, I'm sure parts will be missed as there's been so much going on and so many considerations that were removed over time from the process. This'll be to compare to the current onboarding gateways and why a lot of them get easily abused. With this we're hoping to also inspire other bigger curation projects on the chain to follow on our footsteps and create a win-win-win scenario for everyone involved and the whole ecosystem with it.
The problem
Some of the problems with the current signups are: you have to verify with an SMS, or pay for an account or expect abuse/fake accounts if only email is the main way to sign up.
Many prefer not to use SMS to verify in an age where databases get hacked on the daily and customer info is leaked to hackers who are getting more and more aware of crypto and how it can be used for ransom. At the same time there's a lot of people who want to remain anon in part of their online presence, we've seen this happen on Reddit on the regular and Hive gives people the same freedom. It's your activity that matters, not who you are.
Paying for an account is easy if you're already familiar with crypto, but we don't really have many options to pay for an account with fiat (except hivewallet created by @roelandp afaik) and there may be a lot of newcomers who have no experience with crypto so this option is not a great solution for them.
The last one, as we've seen time and time again people like to abuse, maybe they think they can get some free HP delegations they can use to earn some rewards for no effort (this'll become obsolete with RC delegations come next HF) or they just like to squat certain account names or start fresh when their abuse efforts are eventually busted.
Our solution
The OCD accounts have been claiming account credits for a while now, this has been possible due to the delegations sent to our accounts for curation so naturally we would like to put them to use as best as we can for the community and platform.
We have now set up certain bots on Discord where users with a role can create a link to an account creation through Hiveonboard and without SMS verification instantly have others create an account with the unique link.
So now some info on how everything works and why we decided to do it this way.
The reason these links are unique for each account is so that they can only be used once, at the same time since the bot is creating the links it'll track on who created them to keep the onboarder responsible for who they invited. This will mainly be to mitigate abuse, not only are we going to vet each onboarder we invite but also hold them accountable that if something really shady has occurred (accounts the onboarder has invited turned out to be plagiarisers/scam rings/etc) they'll be quickly removed and at the same time face consequences in forms yet to be decided. Currently there's mainly people sending others to the signup page or hiveonboard directly and it's not easy to know who invited who, if they used a referral link, that's a one time link that anyone can use, for instance someone planning on abusing could use my hiveonboard or peakd referral link. That's why our links will be unique for each new user you invite and one time only.
Now this may sound harsh and you may wonder why would anyone agree to becoming an onboarder. The fact is that through our methods they can't invite the wrong people by accident, of course there'll be a certain percentage that turn out to be foul on their own or misguided or just happen to turn bad later, there's plenty of examples of people doing this after years of being around either way. Not something in our control. What is, though, is who you're onboarding directly and through you they'll get a good chance of learning about Hive the right way.
Now let's talk incentives to both onboarders and the people they're onboarding which may make it clearer as to why it's worth getting involved.
The benefits
Our script that goes through hiveonboard.com to create our account credits is automatically set up to give onboarders a 3% beneficiary cut of posts of the onboarded users. 1% goes to hiveonboard for their service and 1% goes to @ocd for the account token. This is not mandatory, the users can at any time remove it but for starters it's not much of an issue as most likely they wouldn't be on Hive without the onboarder inviting them so it's a nice bonus for the work that goes into inviting and guiding them and making sure they have enough RC's to post.
On top of that we'll be running compilation posts for these as well, mainly on the @lovesniper account which is already focused on introduction posts although these will be separate. The onboarders will earn any rewards that those compilation posts earn due to the time and effort that goes into teaching newcomers how Hive works.
There will also be channels where onboarders will be able to nominate the posts of the users they've onboarded which not only gives them a good welcome but at the same time guarantees some beneficiary rewards as mentioned above.
Final thoughts
We believe this will be a powerful tool for onboarding and retention of new users and content creators. We have a lot of other incentives planned for active onboarders, needless to say if you're doing a good job at it those 3%ers along with compilation posts could turn out to be a nice income generation for those wanting to focus a lot more on onboarding.
OCD and our discord server will of course also always be a great place for newcomers to jump in and ask any questions they may have, find out how they can learn more about Hive and most importantly get connected to the communities where the leaders and curators there will be able to take over retention and engagement for the newcomers.
We believe this is an important step after our community incubation has shown a good amount of success over the past year and to be able to make good use of our account credits and have onboarders be able to more directly and through word of mouth be able to invite new users so they'll be faced with the advantages of Hive easier and won't be missed by curators. Naturally this will only be a part of OCD activities, we're not going to ignore other random newcomers that we've been trying to get to through @lovesniper which is made possible by a bot created by @rishi556 and all our other obligations of curation throughout communities. We have however sunset or "OG" compilation posts for the time being to make room for this and more niche communities.
During testing of our onboarding program, @purepinay has shown how effective it can be by creating invite links easily in our Discord, even sending QR code link invites to users to easily get to their Hiveonboard page and have a Hive account in minutes. She's also brought it to our attention that through this program she could host events to talk about Hive, invite more users at once, use Hivewallet (created by @roelandp) to show them how quick and feeless Hive and HBD transactions can be and how merchants could make use of it to accept Hive and (hopefully a soon to be very stable) HBD. This is something @ocd would love to fund and help get Hive and Hive accounts into more hands so we'll be looking into how we can make that scalable and what more there is that can be done in that regard. Thanks for giving this a testdrive @purepinay and expanding on it!
Alright, I've probably written way too much about this already. We'll be trying to also add some gamification to this program in terms of stats, who's onboarded the most users at certain times, who has the most active users and things like that with extra prizes as incentives to make this a fun and maybe a tad competitive experience for those who get motivated by it. Thanks also to @lemony-cricket for setting up our account creation scripts and discord bots to make this as seamless as possible! Last but not least, thank you to our delegators for making this possible, let's hope we'll run into problems where our voting power won't be enough to be able to support all the new users we'll manage to bring to Hive or that the Hive price catches up and makes that easier to deal with. :)
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned, we'll be writing an application post on @ocd soon for interested onboarders with a vouch system in place for trust. Make sure to follow @ocd and if you like what we're doing, we'd appreciate a vote on @ocd-witness and if you want to assist us with our curation, onboarding and retention, we have a delegation program set up on @ocdb where delegators receive daily liquid Hive from the curation rewards which can be tracked here!
