If we want Hive to grow? Then why is joining Hive so difficult?
Hive growth
As Hive community, we often talk about growth. It's a topic that is discussed often on Hive, in the Discord channels and in Hive podcasts.
Discussions about how we need more active users, more interesting content, more interaction. There are a lot of initiatives of sharing Hive content on Web2 platforms, which is a powerful way to reach new audiences. The Posh initiative for instance generates a lot of views from platforms like Reddit. I've a couple of my photos and blogs being shared on Reddit that generated quite some traffic to Hive.
Account creation
This stream of new people checking out Hive is great, but when they are interested in joining comes the crucial moment: creating an account. And that’s where things go wrong.
What a new user experiences at that point is simply too cumbersome. The process is complicated, not intuitive, and often unclear.
The amount of options that are presented and the many steps a person has to take before he or she can start using are reasons for the average internet user to give up quickly. Especially when they are not interested in tech or crypto.
And even when they manage to create an account, the inability to interact because of a lack of resource credits is highly discouraging.
And that is really a missed opportunity.
Potential
I think there is a lot of potential in Hive. Even though I often hear that blogging is dead, I still think that the community aspects of Hive are still very attractive for people. You can create your niche community and share whatever you want.
I think there are a lot of communities that could become very active when they could onboard large groups of new users.
Initiatives
I’ve been asking around on Discord lately, and it’s clear this issue is known. I've also discovered that there are several initiatives to improve the onboarding process. I already knew about the Inleo 'easy onboarding' methods. The opinions on that are divided. From the botnets it resulted in to the fact that new users wouldn't have the access to their own keys this way.
Yesterday I had a chat with @louis88 in the Hive Discord and he mentioned some other initiatives like one from @thebeedevs that focusses on a Google Login.
https://peakd.com/hive-139531/@thebeedevs/google-login-arrives-on-denser
https://peakd.com/hive-139531/@thebeedevs/decentralized-google-login
And he also mentioned the Hiveinvite tool that is made by @pharesim
This tool removes some of the hurdles by giving Hive users the option to generate account creation links from the free account tokens they have. It even has the option to delegate some HP to for the new accounts, which is great.
The hurdle that is left is that the Hiver that has generated the link does need to creates it the account, so there still is some friction.
Apart from that the users are redirected to the default hive.blog/faq page. Ideally I would like to redirect newly recruited accounts directly to the community I've invited them to.
Coordinated collaboration?
As you see, there are some initiatives to improve onboarding of new users. It is quite telling that I didn't know about most of them, although I'm quite active myself on Hive. I think there is a lack of coordinated collaboration on this subject. There are some good initiatives, but none of them seem to be really removing the onboarding friction we're dealing with without opening the door to more spammers and scammers.
I think we need to find a solution that allows users to quickly and safely create and use an account that can be implemented into all the front ends like Hive.blog, @ecency and @peakd, but also into the microblogging apps like @snapie and hsnaps.
I don't have the solution and I don't have enough knowledge to contribute to this on a technical level. I know there couple of Hivers that do have these skills. The developed tools have shown that.
But what I can do, and what I'm trying to do with this blog is addressing this subject and try make devs combine their knowledge to come up with a solution that might solve this issue.
I hope this blog will open a discussion about this important subject.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this post. Feel free to share your perspective in the comments.
Friendlymoose
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We do need a smooth onboarding process that does not encourage 'bad actors' (but actual bad actors are okay). I think an invitation system where you could automatically allocate a given person some delegation would be good. We know people are willing to install apps for other platforms, so Keychain should not be such a big deal.
Perhaps it could integrate more with things like peakd and ecency to simplify things more. e.g. new user is given keys to import into Keychain and then gets a button to log them directly into one of those front ends. You just can't really get away from having to let them control their keys.
There needs to be simple backup of keys too. Keychain has a way to transfer them to a new device via QR code, but perhaps it could export them to things like Google Drive or other apps, preferably with a password.
Most users will not be technical so everything needs to be as simple as possible, but not simpler than that :)
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Easy inboarding and integration in front-ends is key. There are some good initiatives. I've even seen some more after publishing this blog.
I'm hopeful for the near future!
Hi, I just sent a friend request on Discord. I created a new invite system. Would like if you tried it.
Looking forward to the announcement post.
What you have shown me is really cool!
Joining hive is not the problem its retaining users that is the problem thanks to the hive police for successfully driving every newbies making 0.1$ out of the platform with downvote
I think it is. Retaining users is another problem, but that is not what this blog is about.
About 95% of new users will end up plagiarizing, spamming, insulting someone, begging for votes, or using AI... Then they get hunted down and leave without bringing a single friend. People really underestimate word-of-mouth marketing. Back in the day, there were people who actually helped newcomers. Nowadays, someone sees a newbie plagiarizing and just downvotes all their posts, not only the wrong one. They’re so obsessed with protecting the reward pool that they’re okay with having zero user growth. Even I never upvote new users, because I know they’ll mess something up and lose all their rewards and I’ll lose my curation too.
If there's a trade off between protecting the reward pool for genuine users vs user growth where a lot of them abuse and scam, it's a no brainer which is more important.
If we stop telling people "come here, you'll make money" and instead say "come here, it's a better social media platform", think about how many users we can retain!
Why is joining so hard and scamming so easy , the differend type of keys is also something that keeps confusing people the reason probably is because it was made by developers not thinking of the average normal users with less computer experience .
Indeed. 'Normal' people don't want this 'hassle' with all those keys. They just want to share their thoughts.
If onboarding is the main issue, then it probably makes sense to focus on users who are already familiar with crypto and blockchain. Concepts like wallets, key management, and tools such as Keychain aren’t new to them, so the friction is much lower.
Maybe it’s also worth accepting that Hive isn’t for everyone, and that’s okay.
That said, I still hope more of the broader crypto community eventually finds its way to Hive. It’s essentially a native blogging platform built on blockchain, which is a pretty compelling proposition. Not entirely sure what’s holding that wider adoption back yet 😁
That is an option. Inleo is already doing that. But I don't think Hive should focus on that niche.
It would be better to make onboarding easier, so 'normal' people can also easily join. That could give Hive a serious boost I think.
Whatever we do with onboarding there is still the need to install the keychain app or the browser extension and the user has to put the keys in it. So an ideal normie onboarding would take care of the wallet imports in a seamless way. Maybe the keychain app/extension should have a create light account function so there is no need to import keys for a first time user?
Good point!
Tagging @stoodkev from Hive Keychain :)
last week I was onboarding (or trying to) my youngest grand daughter and her Uni mates , a right artistic bunch big on photography.
When I booted my page up I was basically, but politely told "that's rubbish".
why was I told this?
Because Peakd front end is fucked when it comes to photo management, All the front page first pic are "not found" as are a few within the blog.
No one seems able to fix this long standing issue, apparently it is the fault of an outside provider!
How much is the DHF being drained on new apps and projects when the tech guys can't solve the basics.
TBH it also kills my enthusiasm for blogging and deffo killed off any idea I had of getting new people into the hive
It's a pity with the image thing, not sure what the issue is. It's messed up in my drafts, but ok on all the blogs
yes frustrating