This proposal aims at funding the HiveBuzz project to improve user's gamification experience on the Hive blockchain.
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What is Hivebuzz?
Note: HiveBuzz was formerly named SteemitBoard and within this proposal, when we mention HiveBuzz, it also implies everything that has been done as SteemitBoard.
HiveBuzz is a project that is designed to bring gamification to the Hive blockchain by:
- tracking users' activity and achievements
- notifying them of their progress
- organizing contests and challenges
Users are rewarded with virtual badges and sometimes with HIVE/HBD tokens when there is a prize pool associated with a contest or challenge.
Users can check their achievements on the HiveBuzz Website and look up their ranking to compare themselves to others on the Ranking page.
The HiveBuzz project has been initiated more than 3 years ago by @arcange, a now well-known actor of the Hive ecosystem. This is probably one of the oldest projects on the platform that is still alive.
People love gamification and from the very beginning, the HiveBuzz project was well received and got very positive feedback from users.
Why is HiveBuzz a great tool for the Hive Community?
On top of adding fun to the Hive user experience, one of the underlying goals of the project was to increase user retention.
By challenging people to reach new targets, Hivebuzz keeps people motivated and helps them to stay committed and active on the platform.
This is especially true for new users, as this source of motivation keeps them active on the platform long enough to find friends and people who share the same interests and who, in turn, will support them.
As of today,
- HiveBuzz has sent out 2 625 580 notifications about users' achievements.
- Those notifications generated 54 567 replies from the users
- We receive around 100 -150 comments per day from users saying thank you or wanting to engage with us.
Many users are telling us how they felt welcome at the beginning of their journey on the blockchain because of this tool. They are often surprised to see we take time to answer them.
Hivebuzz also supports users by using its voting power and spread it to as many users as possible when it notifies them. As newcomers receive notifications more often, they also more often receive an upvote.
These are not upvotes with big financial value but, small streams making big rivers, step by step, each HiveBuzz' upvote helps everyone to grow a bit. This goes without taking into account the social added value and the self-esteem they generate. Up to now, @hivebuzz has upvoted a total of 823 787 posts from 141 914 distinct authors!
In return, HiveBuzz has benefited from regular support from many users, with more than 43 000 followers and 850 000 upvotes received for its notification or posts.
In addition to supporting activities and engagement on the platform, HiveBuzz also aims to bring people together in a digital and personal way in order to strengthen communities and create real connections!
We do this by:
- initiating new challenges to earn personal badges
- give projects and communities additional visibility and the opportunity to distribute their own personal badges
- Enable Hive meetup organizers around the world to gamify their activities by providing them with dedicated meetup badges.
In addition to this, the "Meet the Steemians Contest" organized during the last two editions of Steemfest brought an additional dimension to the interpersonal meetings made during these events. Proof of Scan (PoS) and Proof of Hug (PoH) are no longer just theoretical concepts.
Therefore, it can proudly be said that HiveBuzz has proven to be a good and persistent user retention tool over the past 4 years.
Why a Proposal?
Up to now, our founder (@arcange) has always funded this project (at loss) using his own money. This includes:
Infrastructure costs:
Web, database, storage and processes servers (the storage of badges of around 1.4 million users represents ~500 GB to date), security monitoring and management, maintenance and backups.
Web development and graphic design:
It's 2 persons who did the branding of Steemitboard, the rebranding to Hivebuzz, the development and maintenance of the website, the design and deployment of new badges.
Communication and Community Management:
Development and maintenance of the notification infrastructure, answering users' comments (~2,5hrs/day), preparation of contests, challenges and new badges to keep the fire.
Without decent funding, it becomes increasingly difficult to continue to devote sufficient time and energy to a project of this magnitude. Not to mention the work required to make it grow and remain attractive.
We have hundreds of ideas and projects (badges, contests, challenges, ...) just waiting to be developed in order to bring new features and keep you entertained.
Thanks to funding with the DHF (Decentralized Hive Fund), we will be able to deploy them faster, more regularly and provide a more funny user experience.
We could even promote user education in blockchain technologies through gaming as we did with our latest initiative (Hive Revolution - Mission 1).
We are convinced that this can contribute to improving the onboarding and retention of new users, which will ultimately be very beneficial for the whole community.
Why not use Hivebuzz revenues?
The few author rewards collected over the last years from posts and announcements summed up to a total of 2194,- SBD. They have been used to partially cover infrastructure costs and top up the prize pool of several contests we have organized. FYI, such an amount doesn’t even cover the costs generated by the migration from Steem to Hive.
We also run a witness node (@steemitboard) to help the project. It has never powered down, not even to cover its own witness node costs. This enabled the @steemitboard account to garner more Steem Hive Power, providing it with more Resource Credits to interact with all the blockchain users and raising its upvotes value.
Unfortunately, it still wasn't enough, which lead to the call for help made in September 2018 after the introduction of RCs (Resource Credits).
Finally, relying on the reward pool and posts payouts is not a viable option to fund such a project.
Request for Funding
This proposal is not intended to reimburse the expenses that have been incurred so far. It is strictly to cover current and future costs in terms of infrastructure and human resources so that we can continue to do what we have done so far and even more!
Here are the costs that have been budgeted, taking into account our past experience of several years and our plans for the future:
1. Infrastructure ($250/month)
- servers (web, processes, database and storage)
- security and monitoring
- maintenance and backups services
2. Graphic Design and Web Development (2 persons - $2500/month)
- Creation of new challenges and contests with prizes to win
- Design and implementation of new badges
- New features like footer creator, badge creator, contest creator, …
3. Communication and Community management (2 persons - $1000/month)
- Daily interaction with users
- Communication around new badges, challenges, contests and features
- Translation management (we want to support multiple languages)
- Events organization
- Guiding starters
- Reporting about the use of DHF funds
Considering the elements mentioned above, we are asking for 125 HBD per day for the remaining period of 2020.
Transparency:
To show every supporter of this proposal that things move forward, we will do a regular report of the work carried out and project status.
The beneficiary of this proposal has been set to @hivechain.app for more transparency.
@hivechain.app is an account dedicated to funding (d)Apps projects for the Hive blockchain.
The HiveBuzz Team
@arcange has been on Hive since June 2016. He is a professional project manager and software developer that has extensive blockchain-based experience directly relating to C/C++/C#, Javascript, Node, php, SQL. Among the many popular Hive projects he has created or contributed to, you will find HiveBuzz, HiveSQL, Engage, Hive Keychain, Hive Recovery and much more. He also made a name for himself of beeing a PoH pro and a crazy hugger!
While being very interested in the social life on our blockchain, @techybear does not post that much (if not at all), perhaps because Google Translate sucks in converting Web developers code into human language understandable by a layman.
@captaink is a professional graphic designer, with several years of experience in international communication and advertising agencies. He like being challenged when it comes to creating a new graphic chart. You have a dream, he will "badge" it!
@lizanomadsoul
@lizanomadsoul has been active on Hive since April 2017. Starting as a travel blogger, she became part of the creation and maintenance of several projects such as @steemitworldmap, @pinmapple, @haveyoubeenhere, @globalschool or day contests like #beachwednesday and #sunthursday and organized real meetups all over the world including Steemfest Island After Chill. She recently joined the HiveBuzz project as communication and community manager, adding her expertise in strategic business consulting and business development. When she is not working, it is all about travels, sports, health, food and yoga. Yes, she tries to keep the perfect balance.