Hey everyone. It's been a while since we initially announced this program and even though we have picked up over 10 communities and supported them with curation it's time to empower them even more and allow for an application process for new unique niche communities. Before I get started on all the changes and additions I wanted to take the time to talk about communities in general. If you're an avid hiver who already knows everything feel free to skip to the next step.
Communities are a great tool and we as a curation project are happy to see them exist. When we launched the OCD community it made the life very easy for us because we were able to focus on the community and not miss a single post from curation. Our curators were still focusing on posts outside of communities but a few with me included were able to focus mostly on the OCD community and while curating what you wanted to see more of and ignoring or muting things you didn't want to see it improved the quality of content greatly and very quick. After discussing things with some people we started to realize that having general "all goes" communities such as OCD was not the best way forward to empower the platform, if subcommunities came to life it would've made it possible but it would have instead formed diverse big accounts or curation projects to do the same thing just in different places and that would have not been great for the general quality of the platform and stake being spread out all over the place. Instead we kind of deserted the OCD community and started focusing curation onto more unique communities focused on certain subjects. We are happy to see how much some of those have grown since then and are hopeful that we will see many more grow the same way over time. Having a diverse selection of different communities on the leaderboards will make the life of newcomers much easier to join the ones they are interested in and at the same time not be missed on their first posts because the curators and community owners and mods will be focused on checking each and every post that goes through their community. We are very excited to see how this will play out with an appreciating value of hive and an increasing inflow of new users and we want the communities to be ready to welcome them and give them attention.
Community Application Process
If you have a great idea of a unique new community you'd like to start or have started, you can contact us through our Discord and talk to us about it. There are a couple things we'd want you to do before, though.
First off, please check that the community you want to run doesn't already exist in a similar fashion. For instance there already is OnChainArt and SketchBook so another community for art may not be the best one to spend time and effort on but depending on the niche and interest of that niche of art you may be able to convince us to assist you - for example the newly formed PixelArt community we're going to support as that was very active in the past.
Secondly, we'd really appreciate it if you didn't just create a new community account and instantly ask us for support. If you have a great idea please write an introduction post to the community and come to us with that and we will gladly give it some visibility through reblogs and votes to see the reaction of the userbase before we make a decision. What we mean by this is that we'd want you to put in some work before you spend time asking for support or delegations.
Empowering the communities
We've thought long and hard about the best way to empower each community we want to support and at the same time make it possible for any other stakeholder to do the same. After discussing things with the other OCD curators of the best way forward we've come up with this solution, it requires a few words of the thought process before we tell you what that solution is.
One thing that Hivemind is lacking right now is the ability to set beneficiaries on their community to reward their curators and moderators. We realize this is a touchy subject but we believe that incentivizing curators and moderators to do a good job at keeping their community clean and curating well will turn them into much better communities than without. Reddit for instance announced their ERC-20 token which will reward 20% to moderators, although we believe that is a bit much we should still try and give them a little extra motivation and incentive to do a good job with each community they run.
Here's what we suggest.
Each community either creates an account specific for that community or uses the community account (the ones that are called @hive-######) or uses the main account of the owner to:
Write compilation posts of what you've curated that day or that week (depending on activity in your community). This way we can support you with some votes and you can decide how you want to share those rewards with your team members through beneficiaries. At the same time it can empower the owners and curators to grow their stake to be more effective at curation on their own community over time.
If you used the account @hive-###### for instance you could also ask your frequent active posters if they feel like your community moderators deserve some more rewards for their time to set beneficiaries on their posts themselves. If this becomes the norm then each author would easily be able to find the accountname of each community if they want to help their favorite communities with beneficiaries, donations and/or delegations.
Anyway, let us know what you think about these suggestions, we're open to accepting whatever method the community deems to be the most fair.
On that note I'd also want to explain why we've set up different channels in our Discord for each community owner/curator to drop posts they curate and want to receive our curation + trail on. You may think, why is that necessary if we'd have the compilation posts anyway where you could track down what posts they've curated and could vote up from there.
The reason to that is that smaller communities may not have those posts every day, maybe they'll only have 10 great quality posts in a timespan of a week or 3 days and if we have to wait that long before we know what posts to boost up more they could either be too close to payout or our votes won't matter much anymore cause it won't affect trending of that community. Being able to drop posts freshly onto our channels makes it possible for them to filter out their trending better and instead can just do an after report.
Last but not least:
Delegations
We came up with a fun little way for some extra incentive for community owners, curators and moderators to be incentivized to do a great job with their communities and at the same time strive to grow them. Of course our accounts are not that big with stake but considering the amount of communities we might support in the near future it might amount to a lot over time.
From here on out we'd like to delegate to community accounts (or the owners) with HP relative to the subscriber amount of their communities that we are supporting under our incubation program. We'll be updating this monthly and you'll have the delegations as long as we are supporting your community. For instance OnChainArt has 2057 subscribers right now, that would mean 2057 HP delegation from us.
The great part about having community specific accounts that are known to belong to each community is that it will allow others to also add some delegations to their favorite communities. So you might want to consider dusting off those community account keys and start putting it to use. :)
If you've read this far, here is a list of the current communities under our program, some of you may not even know that we've already been curating in your community so feel free to get in touch with us about co-operating and where to receive delegations.
- Hive Gaming
- On Chain Art
- Natural Medicine
- Alien Art Hive
- Lightpainters United
- The Ink Well
- Photography Lovers
Newly added ones:
- Beer
- dSound
- Eco Train
- Feathered Friends
- Haveyoubeenhere
- Vimm
- StemSocial
- Foodies Bee Hive
- The Anime Realm
- Pixel Art
- The Manipulation Station
- Pinmapple
Note: we reserve the right to not delegate or stop supporting your community at any time and for any reason. Also please don't try to game your subscription amount, there's an activity log :P)
Closing words
We hope you appreciate how OCD is planning on supporting new communities to grow and prosper and with them the platform to become the best it can be. We also want to thank everyone who has supported us over the years whether it's been through delegations, vote trailing or witness votes, thank you! Special thanks to: @blocktrades, @roadscape, @yabapmatt, @therealwolf and @thejohalfiles.
We will still be checking the OCD community now and then and curate there but we will strongly encourage authors to instead post onto the fitting communities instead as long as they exist.
If you have any ideas on how to improve on this even more we'd be willing to hear them out or if you have any other comments feel free to share them. :)
We have some more news in the near future we want to share with you but that will have to be for another time as this will probably already take some time to be set up properly and everyone being settled in at empowering their communities. Thanks for reading!