Last week Hiver @demotruk was the main guest of the #hivethrive community hour, this week hosted by @alessandrawhite, @shadowspub and @buttcoins.
For those who don't know Hivethrive shows; they are held every Tuesday at 8PM CEST. Every week the Hivethrive team invites a guest involved in Hive-related projects to talk about their work. Other Hivers can follow the interview live via the Voice Channel and ask questions in the chat.
Check out the official Hive Discord Server to see when the shows are and tune in next Tuesday!

A few weeks ago I recommended @demotruk to the Hivethrive team since I think it would be interesting to hear some more about his projects. And that wasn't a bad idea at all. It was a great show where @demotruk explained about his recent posts focusing on statistics on user retention.

User retention on Hive

We all know it's difficult to keep users on the Hive platform. Especially in times when the price of Hive and thus the rewards are low.
But the following stat presented in demotruks blog still shocked me!
@ocd has the highest user retention of the large onboarders with 46% or 36% after 6 months (depending on whether the new user created an #introduceyourself post). But on the other side of the graph is Leo.voter with 28% retention, or just 2% for users who didn’t make an #introduceyourself post.
But what amazes me is the effect of the user of the #introducteyourself tag (later more on that!).

The following stat was also very interesting. The user retention after 6 months increases significantly when the rewards increase.
It might sound obvious, but it also reignited the discussion about whether we should support our newly onboarded users a bit better.
Interacting with posts from new users and giving them some upvotes will surely help increase the user retention.
During the show some Hivers mentioned initiatives to follow posts of newly onboarded Hivers.

The discussions during the show made me reflect on what I do for newly onboarded Hivers. And I must admit: it isn’t that much. But the show definitely inspired me to do better!
In Dutch we have a saying that translates to: Change the world, start with yourself! And that is what I did; I started exploring some of the initiatives that were mentioned in the chat during the show.
I will share these initiatives and my experiences in this blog.

New user feeds

The reason that I hardly see new users posts is that I mostly use my 'Following' and 'Community' feed for finding interesting posts to upvote and/or comment on.

During the show a couple of people mentioned initiatives to support new Hivers. I'll first list them here and mention who posted them in the chat.
Clicking them will redirect you to the feed immediately.

• Lovesniper (mentioned by @palomap3)
• Pioneersupporter (mentioned by @starkerz)
• Swarmpost (mentioned by @demotruk)
• #introduceyourself (discussed in the show)

Lovesniper
Lovesniper is an initiative by the @ocd curation team. In their retention curation post they explain it as follows:

The Lovesniper Retention curation initiative aiming to retain those quality content creators after making their introduction posts. It was observed that after newbies made their introduction posts, their succeeding posts are often ignored. This initiative will hopefully encourage the newbies to continue posting quality content and interact with anyone in the community. As compilation posts are also done, this will highlight the newbies and will give the community an idea which newbie to look out for.


OCD's Lovesniper team will follow everyone who made an introduction post and @lovesniper's feed will be the place to scour those quality content from new authors. Curators will check all the posts in the feed to find under-rewarded posts and recommend them for curation.

So, the OCD curators can nominate posts in the stream that they think deserve an upvote from OCD.
But we can use this stream as well to find interesting new users as well to support and/or engage with.

Pioneersupporter
Another initiative is the Pioneersupporter feed. The account doesn't have a lot of information about what it does (maybe you could create a short post in this account @starkerz), but it does have one comment saying:

"Its a full feed of users that have a high degree of trust."

If I remember correctly (and correct me if I'm wrong) these are users that are onboarded 'in real life' by other Hivers via checkinwith.xyz. So you won't be seeing many bots in this stream.

Swarmpost
This initiative was created by @demotruk. Just like Pioneersupporter, Swarmpost works with trust. You can become a member of the trust network and vouch for a user you brought to Hive or sponsor a user if you believe they are a real person, which makes you responsible for that account.
Both newly onboarded users as sponsors can win rewards in a lottery.

How to Help New Users Enter the Lottery
If you're part of the trust network, you can help new Hive users become eligible for the lottery:

Vouch — If you know who onboarded a new user but their on-chain creator is a service account (like @hiveonboard), comment on their introduction post:

!vouch @realcreator

This tells the system who really brought them to Hive. The attested creator receives the onboarder's share of the rewards.

Sponsor — If a new user has no trusted onboarder at all but you believe they are a real person worth supporting, comment on their introduction post:

!sponsor

This makes you responsible for that account. You receive the onboarder's share of the rewards. Sponsoring requires a higher trust score than vouching.

If you are onboarding people you know, it might be interesting for you to use this service.
I personally don't onboard users I know, but I did register my account via https://hiveinvite.com/trust/ so I'm able to sponsor newly created accounts that I trust are human.
And I will keep an eye on the swarmpost feed as well.


#introduceyourself
The #introduceyourself tag exists for a long time. New users are often encouraged to create an introduction post with this tag. If you open this tag on your favourite front-end you get all the introduction posts.
If you're using the @PeakD front-end, you can even 'bookmark' this stream by clicking the star (it will turn blue). This way you can easily access this stream via the "Explore" menu in PeakD.

By default the stream is sorted by the most trending posts. By clicking the sort button you can change it to 'Recent' to see the most recent introduction posts.

My first impression

I've been checking these streams for the past few days. I must say there are quite a few new users being onboarded on Hive and a lot of them seem to be genuine people that want to add something to Hive.
I'll keep on checking these streams for a while to see if I can support some newly onboarded Hivers.

PeakD lists

One other dilemma I had while engaging with the new Hivers was how I keep track of them after their first posts. I don't want to start following all. I don’t want my following list to grow too large so I can keep track of the people I follow.

But PeakD has a neat solution for this, which is lists. In PeakD you can create multiple custom lists and add accounts to those lists. The lists show up under the "Feeds" menu in PeakD.
By clicking one of your lists under the Feeds menu, you are presented with all posts of the users on that list.
So what I’ve done is create a “Newbies” list where I add newly discovered Hivers I’m curious about, to see what they’ll be posting in the future.

Adding a list and accounts to that list is really easy in PeakD. When you're reading someone's blog you see their profile on the right hand side which has on option "List". When you click that button you can create a new list or add the account to one of your existing lists.

I will regularly check my "Newbies" list to see if they have created any new blogs. These personalized list feeds can also be opened via the mobile version of PeakD as you can see below.

Automated comments

During my experiment with the feeds of new users I've discovered something else, which is automated comments.
Several new accounts automatically receive replies from some accounts. Most of them are (or at least seem) automated. I have some mixed feelings about it.

One of the accounts is certainly creating automated comments. Rafiki is an AI controlled account that replies on newly created posts via Inleo.
It does mention it is an AI agent in the comment itself, but I doubt if we give a good signal with these comments. Especially when it's the only comment a post gets...

Another comment I noticed a couple of times is from a particular account telling people to power down and sell. Also not a good thing when there are just a few comments.

I did see another positive initiative recently, but I can't seem to find it anymore 😬
It was an autoreply that scanned the blog with AI and suggested both Hivers as Communities to follow based on the content of their blog. I found it very interesting since it guides new users and shows them users and communities that they might like.

If anyone knows which initiative this is, please share it in the comments. I also wonder why I can't see these comments on all recent #introduction posts.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on user retention and engagement. Are you engaging with newcomers? Do you have something to add to this blog? Do you know of any other initiatives perhaps? Please share it in the comments!

Friendlymoose