Amazing, thanks so much for putting in the time and effort for this!
I want to take the time to input some more info on how the onboarding program currently works, perks it gives to onboarders and onboardees, and some other things that may answer your questions, maybe it may even encourage some new onboarders to apply for a position reading this and looking at the stats above.
At this point in time it can be scaled up, we at @ocd do manual curation only and then another vetting/checking process before votes land on nominated posts. We strive to give people rewards based on multiple factors to make sure they "earn" them which usually means there's a lot of effort behind the rewards to give them another "hidden" value. Compared to say some who may get post rewards easily and consistently no matter their activity or post quality/effort. This means that with the current somewhat stagnant user activity some of our daily voting power goes towards @hbdstabilizer as we don't want to just "overreward" users for the sake of spending all our daily mana. This means there's definitely room for growth if we see onboarding through our program or in general a lot of new users joining the platform that we try to find and curate. Other than that, plenty of other stakeholders/curation projects also curate or trail our votes to reward users we've onboarded.
On top of it all, we also adjust our votes based on the price of Hive to keep rewards somewhat fair and reasonable. If the price of Hive goes up a lot, as we've seen a couple years ago, our vote strength adjusts lower and if it dips quite low we may end up spending more mana and less on hbdstabilizer for instance. I believe this is something that in the event of a big increase of new users joining would affect the price and allow us to scale the project to cover both onboarded users either from our program or in general (we also run the @lovesniper initiative) along with our general curation activities of niche communities.
Your 3rd question, something that may be considered a cost and some of the perks to being an onboarder are: 1. Onboarders get the beneficiary settings placed on accounts they've onboarded, it's usually 3% to the onboarder and 1% to the account credit giver and 1% to the service that created the account. Keep in mind though, that this isn't set in stone and onboarded accounts can remove the beneficiary settings at any time. It is a nice bonus for the onboarders though which the new accounts don't mind since they wouldn't have received any rewards without having been onboarded but eventually when they've learned the ropes or decide to themselves can remove them. Secondly, onboarders in the program are also encouraged to guide the new accounts and teach them the basics of hive, this works well with the beneficiary settings because if they don't post they may not get any beneficiary rewards and at the same time to keep track of all accounts they've onboarded and give them a warm welcome, they can somewhat guarantee curation and the 3% beneficiary reward by nominating their posts to us for curation. There are however times where the onboarded users don't post even after having been guided, or they decide to plagiarise or abuse in some shape or form even after being warned about it, etc, that's why we also do a "1 time" reward by compiling introduction posts of onboarded accounts on the @ocdb account and sending the post rewards to those who onboarded them. This is to not make the effort placed on the onboarders of guiding and teaching the new accounts go to waste fully if it turns out to not be an active/decent user they onboarded. So the costs would in general be quite low and come mostly from the post reward pool.
We've fine-tuned the onboarding program over time. You can imagine that being in such a position to be an onboarder not only gives you some nice perks but it can also be a position of power. For instance an onboarder could pretend to be onboarding new users but it turns out that's just his alt account he's nominating for curation to double-dip/get easy post rewards. This is something we try to check as often as possible with a lot of eyes having access to the nominations to avoid. This is why vetting the onboarders and them having "something to lose" in terms of reputation is important. There are of course instances where the onboarder isn't at fault for new users abusing/plagiarising, after a certain amount of these things happening we may just part ways with the onboarder without consequences to him directly but we reserve the right to treat it accordingly if we find the onboarder was the one abusing on purpose in one way or another (such as downvotes for instance) which brings us back to only accepting onboarders that have a reputation and "something to lose". Another perk to keep onboarders from attempting such activities for rewards is that we also allow them to nominate their own posts in moderation if they are underrewarded authors we would have curated either way if they weren't involved with us.
We've also set certain thresholds on onboarded users curation so people wouldn't be incentivized to join through an OCD onboarder rather than to just create a Hive account on their own and get involved. Once a new user is onboarded their posts can be nominated for max 3 months to us directly, the votes that land on them are quite similar to other posts we'd curate in the community incubation, etc, but over time the amount of nominations of a particular onboarded author start to dwindle from 3 nominations/week in their first month to 1/week in their 3rd month and then no longer. We expect that after 3 months users ought to have learned enough about Hive to have gotten injected in the community and receive curation either from our incubation activity (i.e. nominated by other curators (not their onboarders)) or by other curation projects/stakeholders.
We've also been meaning to offer delegation rewards to active and effective onboarders who'd like to focus more on this aspect on top of all the other perks mentioned above but without exact stats like these it's been hard to manually keep track of everything, maybe we'll start it up now again if you'd be interested in updating this data once a month or so. :)
For anyone interested in this, feel free to reach out to us in our Discord under the #onboarder-application channel
Lastly, @ocdb has been generating accounts for hiveonboard for a long time now which many projects and users rely on. While the dev has unfortunately not been very active, we're looking into creating our own solution to it soon with some added features and to avoid some of the issues it's been having lately. The 1% beneficiary that @ocdb may receive from post rewards of accounts it creates go back to the delegators delegating to the account in daily rewards (you can sometimes see some hbd going out to delegators along with added hive cause of this).
Thanks again and thanks to our current onboarders for their awesome efforts!
Ohhhh I see that's how it works
Thanks a lot for this profound and easily understandable explanation @acidyo now I know how it works around here. Most of the onboarded users only joined and become active for the first three months but after that, they lost interest. This is something we could try to find out ways how to let them stay longer and participate in the discussion.