And when they see it in action, they feel the momentum they, I think that will work towards retaining users, but also the, again the businesses will have a place to come in, ask questions, ask what resources. Exist for them. We can answer that sort of thing. Just so I like that idea, Eric. I think that was you that talked about future town halls.
If we could have a few more that are more working ones and we could still have the show off ones as well. Because that gives users an idea of what exists. Those ones are also needed. That's my thoughts on this subject.
moderator:
Exactly. Sorry to jump in before everyone with the hand raised. The point of these town halls, it's exactly that and this is just the second one, but... We want to have one every month. If we have people from the community saying, Hey, let's just have them every two weeks, we can actually have them. We can approach topics and building from different places or from different approaches. So yes, Jarvie, a hundred percent.
Elmer:
I just wanted to reflect on some of the points made earlier by I think it was NathanSen and the guys at DBuzz. Great work, by the way. I just wanted to talk about what we call value4value and when we talk about onboarding people from in real life what are they coming for?
Because one of the issues that we found was that if you bring people to your platform, you can get a lot of catchment fairly easily. Okay. The problem is why do they stay? And we have to be honest with ourselves here. There aren't a lot of reasons at the current stage that keeps people here apart from the financial side.
And that gives people mercenary attitudes, right? We attract people who come for the rewards. And then when they're very low, they tend to leave. Now that's something that I've tried to address over time. In fact, when Liketu initially launched, we didn't even put up the rewards, we didn't want people to be participating because of that.
But then we found that as soon as we put it up people started coming, obviously that's a big side of it and we shouldn't ignore it. However when we're talking about onboarding masses, we have to realize that we might be setting our goals a little bit too high.
Something that has worked very well for us, is we've focused on workshops and supporting grassroot communities that are able to become bigger demographics. For example, we worked with a lot of Venezuelan communities, the Holos Lotus, the hive’s red carpet and what we've done is we've tried to support them, help to engage with them help them create initiatives to run on our platform and then what they do is they bring their user base and their communities onto our platform and they tend to stay because, we have a relationship with these people and initially it's not going to be like 5000 students.
It's not going to be the masses that we all hope for. Yeah. But the thing is, these people are solid in foundation, and that is something that I think we're not doing enough of, which is laying a very strong foundation so that we can lean on this as we grow. The moment you start to try and bring in 50,000 people, tens of thousands of people, you have to think about how you are going to keep them here.
Okay, what is it that's keeping them grounded? Now, if it was someone who was creating exclusive content and they were ultra internet famous, then maybe yes, people will stay here because that one person is going to stay here, but it's very difficult to get that one person to just be hive exclusive, right?
So again, I go back to how do we message deliver a message that keeps people grounded. And it isn't misdirecting them in the sense that, oh, we're just here to give handouts because there is a lot of confusing messaging going on right now. And I think having a consistent message.
Will help all of us and like I said one of the ways that we've decided to go about the way that we do Things is to support communities from the grassroots up and that's from our own pocket as well. We're not using any money from anywhere else but our own pocket and I think in that sense it helps us stay grounded as well.
I mean we could go crazy, but you know when you spend your own money you're more careful about how you go about it, right? So I think this is a lesson that we could all learn.
Ecoinstant:
Let me jump in here, wrap up a few things. So we have a saying in Spanish. Si haces una cosa, no haces la otra. And this is Hive's big problem. When you do something, you're not doing the other thing.
And I know probably everybody in here has experienced this. Hive is an ecosystem. You could do so many things here, but that is at the same time that it's our superpower. It's our biggest weakness when it comes to marketing we need. And so I love what Jarvie and the WOO guys are saying, what Elmer has been talking about, so if Jarvie is focusing on onboarding, But he's focusing on onboarding projects.
Something to can be focused, focusing on supporting smaller communities and those smaller communities like hybrid need to be focusing on attracting and retaining users. Like we can't each do everything. We need to focus on the niche, the niches. That we have here on Hive. Everybody needs to like work really hard on what they're doing and that is not to do less, it's actually to do more.
We're going to get more done if we focus, we really drill down. That's how marketing works by the way. You can't... I'm doing some work with tourism here in Columbia and you can't make a site that says visit Columbia. There's a thousand things to do. You need to make a site that says, come climb this waterfall.
And then when they're there climbing the waterfall, you can say, Hey, there's some other things. Are you interested in any of them? But you need to be very specific. That is how marketing works. So And just to tie on to that, and then you, I'm fine to be rotated out here. Great conversation today. I want to and I know that Leo is working on this.
Eric has reached out to me. I would like for some of us. to create a small mastermind group around Twitter. Twitter or X is a really powerful platform and we've been in the hive space and even before with Steam we've been trying to use it, we've been trying to figure it out. I think I've been reading a lot recently and researching I think a lot of us are going about it the wrong way and I think together We could maybe make a small group of people to focus on best practices and really extending our personal brands and mention Hive sometimes.
Not every single tweet we write about has hive in it because I don't know if it's shadow banning or I don't know I don't know if it's just really annoying and people just don't like that But we need to work together to use Twitter. These spaces are fantastic. We should keep doing them I love the idea.
I don't remember if it was Jarvie at this point who said it, but let's have different types of spaces. I love the town hall, but there's some things maybe in smaller groups we can dive into. Let's continue to work together to use Twitter to its maximum potential. We are, we're getting into excitement mode again.
So all the effort we put in now is going to be multiplied tenfold. Let's focus on doing and focusing on the things. That are the right things and maybe just step back a little bit from generically promoting hive because that's not really working in my opinion what i've seen the generic high promotion is weak But the very specific Wrestling niche is going to be really effective for people interested in that niche and that can be applied to a thousand different niches.
moderator:
I think marketing Hive as a general thing is not really not very effective, just like marketing Amazon Web Services to a regular user. They don't care about that. They just want to use their app that they want to use.
More Focused marketing is definitely a huge key factor to bring people in.
Grampo:
Actually I have a vision which I want to share, and that is making onboarding to Hive profitable. Just think about it. Today when we're just onboarding regular users, you cannot charge money for this, for that education that you're giving people.
But if you're helping people, educating them about launching their own, let's say social shop which actually meant to generate revenue, which can be profitable sometimes through advertising and the shop itself. is actually a full featured Hive front end. When you're running your shop, it has all the user profiles, people can do transactions in their profiles, they can sign up, they can participate in topical discussions.
But now we can have basically people on Hive that can learn how to launch these shops and then provide this as a service. They can actually teach other people or help them launch. So we, maybe we're approaching such a stage where basically educating people about Hive can be a very interesting profession on itself.
moderator:
Yeah. And I just want to echo on this. So we really need, just like Elmer said, we need a consistent message. I don't think that the Rewards to bring them here to bring users here is the way to go.
Yes, they are a plus, but I also want to add, and maybe the founders can consider this for their marketing, but we should focus on digital identities and how web two doesn't allow you to keep your content, to own your data, to own your followers that you cannot get de platformed. The digital identity concept can actually get us somewhere.
The rewards will be a plus and the community will make them stay, as part of the InLeo team, but also as a regular user I'm going to a lot of spaces, I probably attend four to five spaces every day. I speak, I try to build my own brand so that people come to hive through me, but not as a shiller, but just as someone who can add something to the conversation.
And what I use is, okay, you can come through Leo because that's the way I do it. But whenever I bring someone in, I tell them we have all of these dapps and you can use the same account for all of them. And maybe inLeo will not retain them, but maybe Liketu will, or maybe threespeak will. So as long as we bring users to hive and they stay because of someone else. That's also fine. The key is to all bring in users and then the whole ecosystem retains them.
Khal:
There's this famous story about Genis Khan and he ruled over one of the biggest empires in history, and when he was dying, he passed it on to his sons. And in doing that, he took one arrow and snapped it over his knee.
And then he took a bunch of arrows. And tried to snap it over his knee and obviously couldn't. And he basically taught them a lesson that when they take over his empire, they need to work together to keep it together and to continue their conquest and keep growing it.
I'm a firm believer in, together you're strong, alone, you're weak.
I really think. And I like what Eric said about having a consistent message, you need to have a consistent message and you also need to segment people, in my opinion, and you need to deliver the message to the right people at the right time in the way that they need to hear it. You have a narrative about digital identities for the average user and in my opinion, that's that target audience. There's plenty of people out there who are looking for a digital identity that can't be taken away from them because, maybe they've been shadow banned or outright banned or, they've had a friend removed from social media. So they're, that's what they're looking for.
And then there's other creators out there who are looking for rewards, and they're looking to build a personal brand. And so they need a completely different message than a digital identity. And then there's developers out there who are looking for work and looking for a cool place to build, fun technology that pushes the world forward in a vision they believe in, and that's a whole other audience segment to target.
And then you've got entrepreneurs and business owners who can be targeted in a whole other way. Jumping back to what Jarvie was talking about too, with having different town halls for different, different aspects of onboarding and teaching people about, what Hive is about, like you've got I could see a vision of, a town hall for digital identities where the whole discussion is, by the users for the users, why they believe that, you Having a digital identity is important and, talking about that, I could see a whole other one with, the Hive core devs and, project owners and other developers that are in the space in the Hive space, talking about what they've built, why they're building it, why Hive is, where they're building, talking about what they've done this week, this month I've seen a lot of other projects, that do that, obviously I follow Thorchain pretty closely and they do, they've got dev town halls, they've got community town halls.
And it's, you can see that there's a lot of new people that come into those town halls and they're just sitting back and listening, trying to gather an understanding of what that blockchain is about.
And I could see, different town halls happening every single week for Hive in that way.
And then, Grampo was talking about making referrals or onboarding profitable. And we've been working on this referral system that's on-chain that uses a percentage of ad revenue and rewards and the rewards pool to actually reward people who refer people into the ecosystem and sign up for an account.
I also agree with that, that's a huge way to get new people in. And then you can also keep them more engaged and retained over time. When you look at things like friend tech, they exploded because of referral systems and influencer tickets. So in my opinion, that's going to be another key piece onboarding.
Nathan:
Yeah, so I just wanted to touch on what EcoInstant was saying earlier about setting up some groups for us to mastermind together what's actually working for other people on onboarding, because if we all go out and try to, reinvent the wheel ourself, instead of looking to see, what's working for other people and try to implement similar strategies.
Or just to have those discussions, to be able to discuss like what we're doing and, the results that we're getting from this marketing campaign that we're doing because we've done all kinds of different marketing and had varying different success on it. And we found that in person meetups and targeting communities has rendered the best results, and that's one of the reasons why we feel like going into the colleges and providing services and internet connection to colleges in areas that either they can't afford it or it's not available doing the work to get the infrastructure put in place so that these colleges are brought online and have internet connection for all their students.
And yeah, so I would love to talk to other Hive dapp founders about this and see what we can share with each other on, on different successful onboarding and retention strategies.
moderator:
Yes, this is why we're here, we need to work together, just like Nathan was saying to bring the masses, and everybody going out with one, one single strategy is not going to really work yeah, that's why we're doing this thing the Town Hall is to bring people together, and we all want to see Hive grow at the end of the day.
@howdaryllrolls:
We've definitely had some interesting experiences trying to onboard people, but we found that it works best to really target the people who are the most receptive.
If you go back to the dot com bubble, it was only nerds that used the computer. And those nerds did have a vision for what things are today. And, we all know Amazon existed back then. Bill Gates existed back then. So I think one of the core things is if we can find the most receptive people, a IE for us people in Brazil, because for them, making five, 10 on a skateboarding post is life changing money compared to, for me, that's like buying a coffee and maybe a donut.
So we find that it's more receptive there. And then when you can build that core. We've been branching out into things like cross posting with NARS a completely different project on Ethereum and I think they moved to something else. But we're working on making an app that's going to be similar to how when you post on Instagram or you post on Facebook, you can have it cross post over into this other app like Facebook or Instagram.
So we're trying to recreate that, but for the Web3 community and those people who are receptive from there. And we feel if we can build that really strong core community that then starts going around the world putting on events and skating around the world, which is something that's a lot more attractive than talking about crypto and the rest of the, trying to explain it to the Web2 world.
We've started to see a lot of success in that sense as well as um, I just had something in my mind and then I immediately forgot it. But yeah, generally we're, we have one of the most famous skaters in the world on our project. He's posted multiple times and I would think that would be something that would be like, oh, now thousands of people are going to join, but we still have to perfect that relationship and make sure we're doing it as good as possible so that it is appealing.
And I guess I, oh yeah, the thing that I was thinking of that I forgot I often like to, when people, when, instead of trying to explain how Hive works, which is overly complicated, I like to explain how Facebook works and how they're giving up the value that they're creating to these giant monopolies.
And that's usually one of the things that, that people get no matter what, uh, type of world they're into. They don't have to be complete nerds to know that Facebook is evil and not good. That's, those are some of the approaches that I've taken.
moderator:
Guys, we are going to do a recap of this whole space on @town-hall. We're going to upload the whole video to three speak and we'll also do a brief about all of the takes here and what we find valuable so that the community, it's up to you to subscribe to these strategies and align with these mindsets.
And for the founders, it's up to you to collaborate and create synergies. We are only the medium to help you guys create synergies. So hopefully, this brings a lot of value to Hive. I can already see a lot of people hyped about the future of Hive, just because we are coming here together and trying to build something as an ecosystem.
moderator:
I'm just ecstatic that that this is going very well and I'm loving everything I'm hearing here and I think we're we're getting ready to move into a more open section where we're gonna rotate in some, just some people from the audience.
Of course I've been scouring the threadcast, waves and dbuzz for some questions, so I'll be dropping those as well. Jongo, did you want to take it from here?
moderator:
Yeah, for sure, man. So yeah, like Nifty was saying, we're scouring the blockchain for questions and feedback that you guys might have for the apps for anyone here, so if you have any questions, please do request to come on up and we will address this because I think this is really important to know, just echoing what everyone said here already. This is community and something that is really important to me and I'm sure it is for a lot of other people on this space is that's what attracted you to hive was that it was true Web3. It was true decentralization. It was true community. And that's what we hope to bring to these spaces and to the blockchain. Please do it's open. Let's really showcase to the world what Hive is. And put in community first.
There's a couple questions that that I've copied over here, and maybe we can get an answer from some of the specific apps. I know we have a couple actifit questions. @idksamad says, how do those fitness guys know about ActiFit first other than Google? Any plan to push it into local communities like gyms?
McFarhat:
Yes, actually we do have a lot of plans to infiltrate gyms. We started some local effort here. In Lebanon. We started talking to wherever communities are. Actually, we went to the streets. We went to a place where people do a lot of jogging and fitness activities.
We ran the event last month. We started talking to some gyms to prepare for some events here in Lebanon, as well as universities, because this is where a lot of youth is. There was an event scheduled for this month, but unfortunately, with the whole Middle East. Problems happening right now. So we had to adjourn this but we're collaborating with Some people here on the chat on the potential for another event, outside lebanon the plans for growth on the gym level is tremendous.
We do want to tackle this on a larger scale In terms of the web presence we are pretty much available on all socials. We try to to publish content all the time to increase our reach, to improve our SEO so that we are more available. We do run some paid ads every now and then as well for Actifit.
We try to publish the name Actifit and associating this with fitness on different platforms that support anything related to fitness. So these are some of the work we do and some of the plans we have. And thank you for the question. Thank you. Yeah, I love that. Thanks for dropping the questions.
moderator:
We have a question for Elmer from Liketu from@aalviarez: Are you satisfied with the level of quality that users are showing on Liketu? In your opinion would we have to improve something to show that what you are looking for for people who have not reached the app yet?
Elmer:
Okay, so I read that question as whether the quality is, Up to par. And am I happy with the quality that's being posted? I do think that this is an interesting question because I think quality is a consequence of higher participation. And the more participation, you obviously have a higher bidding of competitors and that drives up the quality.
So one of the things that we try to do is just to encourage more participation. And I'm not one of those believers of outright quality over results. I think results matter more than the quality itself. And the quality is really just one of the ways that you could get those results. But I'm not going to say that, everything of the highest quality is going to get the most success.
Because it doesn't work like that in my eyes, I think the more important thing is, if you have certain qualities as an individual, as a creator, and one of them is creating high quality content, then by all means, however I think what is more important in an attention economy, no attention, not quality is how much attention you can gather.
And so I think I weigh that to be more important than outright quality.
moderator:
I just want to echo what Elmer is saying in my personal opinion, I don't care if a post that has 10,000 words on a hundred pictures is amazing in quality, so to speak, but it's bringing two pair of eyes into hive, whereas a cat picture from an influencer or from someone who's got a big follower base they bring in 100 pair of eyes to hive, I would say I would value that cat picture 10 times more than what some people would consider quality content in my personal opinion the approach that we had seven years ago, six years ago, five years ago where quality content was king and we should have a cool front end with with a front page or a trending page with amazing content was the way to go.
I think that we have proven over the past seven years that this is not going to work. We need eyes. Yes, we need quality, but this is not the only thing that is going to bring in the masses, especially right now that the younger generations, they don't care about reading a 1500 word post, they just care about being entertained, liking what they see, getting engagement, engagement brings so much people into social media, the dopamine rush and the instant gratification sense that users get on X just by getting some likes that are worthless is huge.
So just to echo what Elmer said. Dude, quality I don't think it should be the way to go, yes, we need it. It's valuable, but it's not the only way.
@alohaed:
Fantastic to be here. Great town hall. I just want to say we had wrestling organization online here, and I'm absolutely appalled that we didn't get not one single woo to get everybody fired up. Next time. Now I am primarily, I'm primarily on hive because I am. Terrified. I am terrified and mortified about the state of free speech.
And so that's the thing that's important to me, but to get there, I will be excited about anybody's project. If it's wrestling, if it's selfies or to, if it's anything on any of these platforms, I tend to associate with some people, but on any given day. And I'm willing to bet almost everyone who uses Hive is like me.
I use at least four or five different front ends and use the different front ends for different things. So if we can get people here, if they can get people here, they will discover your front ends. And sometimes front ends is the way to sell people. Now I've got a friend who's listening in online and I'm talking to individuals now.
Marketing, marketing, the potential of hive. I've got a friend listening in. He's Mike S. Miller. He's been a 30 year comic book artist for Marvel and DC comic book. Everyone here, even if you're not a comic book nerd has probably seen his work. And this is, it occurred to me, this is one of the great things we could do on hive, whether it be serialized or episodic content, where I was going with this.
Is apart from our communities on Hive, apart from our passions in Hive, you probably have a topic, a group, an organization something that you talk about on web too. What I've had great luck with so far, and I'm a relatively newcomer to Hive is writing things about these communities, talking about people.
Now I write it on Hive. And then I share it on Twitter, I share it on Instagram or Facebook these legacy social media profiles addressing these specific things that are specific to these people. But now they can see that they can come over and they can read it on peak day or they can read it on the buzzer and they are again.
Whatever, whatever platform gets you excited. And I hope you're like me, I hope like you're like me and you value free speech. And so don't just stay, don't just stay in that narrow niche because anything we do. That helps any one of these individual pieces succeed will support our free speech or will support the thing that gets you passionate or gets you fired up with that.
I should say real quickly and not to be confused with a VSC's proposal. The speak network team has a proposal and the things that speak. I want to build are going to help build infrastructure that is going to prolong the life of hive. It's going to make it better, particularly with regards to sharing and storing files and video, which is absolutely critical.
It's going to make it snappier, faster and more resilient, and it's going to help all of us. So please do take a moment and take a look at the speak network funding proposal. Eric Nifty, Jono Cal, all you wonderful people and people I haven't met yet. Fantastic job today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Edwin, for blessing us with your angelical voice.
@jza:
Just want to be quick. I really think that we're doing a great job especially, uh, with the events. Although the events are very small because of the global nature of traveling is quite not as affordable for everybody, but it builds community, and I think we've seen this thing happening in Venezuela as well.
We've seen the pictures wasn't there, but you can feel that a lot of people were inspired by it. They actually make them feel like a community, and I think that feeling is a great marketing tool. We should, uh, think about that as Blueprint to support more community integration, breaking the ice, making people meet each other and such.
I don't know how easy or hard would that be being us that we are digital first to have communities come forward, create their own events, especially when we're talking about money. I know it's not cheap to do these things, but to a degree, I think it helps a lot. As far as marketing goes, so maybe we don't need I mean we do, but besides having a huge global event, we might want to scale it a bit, a little bit down down for regional events and go after communities, of course, that are more able to meet each other in their geography, cuba or Venezuela in this case, or Columbia as such, maybe get that idea to Asia and Africa. I think that will be also a good thing to do and then start coming with better engagement with developers, with people that want to build, and people that want to take Hive to different areas. I think that would be some of the things we could do.
Also, should we really be tied to blogging? I know we were birthed from blogging, but like people said, or mentioned already, I think a lot more people understand video. And images as we right now live on a more YouTube and Instagram esque social media than a WordPress and blogger and a few years back.
And I think that's one of the things that I wanna talk about and I hope people can take it and make it happen.
***@r0nd0n:
I actually have a few questions here because this right here was something going to I was going to individually message people but since all the front end developers and all the front end of Owners are in this space right now, presents a pretty unique opportunity for me and I just figured I'd jump on it.
So I'm about to propose a pretty contentious idea on the Hive blockchain and I need to know a little bit about the impact of this idea. And so I have a few questions. First of all, let me give a little bit of a gist. This isn't to discuss the merits of my idea here. That'll be all done on the Hive blockchain.
I just got a question for the front end developers and owners. I think that with the, I've been first of all, a little background, I should probably preface this. I've been in the downvote abuse fighting service for most of my steam hive life. I think downvotes are going to be really negative to our retention and to our user base.
I'm sure everybody here at some point has seen that or experienced that in 1 way or another. Where people really don't understand that rewards aren't theirs until it's paid out at the seven days. And they were, driven off the platform for having the wrong opinions or whatever.
And I think that this is something that is psychologically, it's a reason why Twitter, why Facebook that, why they don't have a downvote or a dislike button, because psychologically it, it impacts us and it completely ruins the social media experience. Now with Hive, we have to do it because of the reward pool, and that's what this is about.
I think that we need to sunset the reward pool. I think we need to completely remove rewards on Hive. And this has just become even more important with the advent of AI. Right now, we can use AI to detect AI and understand, oh yeah, there's an 80 percent chance that this post was written by AI, and stuff like that.
I don't think that's going to last forever though. That's not going to be something that we can count on forever. And we are in a ticking clock situation to where essentially, we're not going to tell a human from a person. And that's a scary thing. But anyway this is just my opinions and this is the stuff I want to put out there.
But I I need to know from the front end people. If we were to remove the reward pool, number one, is it Will it devastate, will it completely ruin your chances to keep on creating the, your front end? And number two, If you can do it like what kind of a runway, like effort in my mind.
I've got 2 years. I'm thinking because I don't think we should just flip off a switch tomorrow. I think we need to have, the reward pool is a nice loss leader. It gets people attracted to us. I think we need to have a ticking clock where in 2 years time or 3 years time or 1 year time ends.
We need to have an end point or, it's more of a. Yeah, a little bit more of a pressure situation to get people to do it. But anyway, that's my question would it completely ruin your front end and if if not, then how much of a leeway time would you need to make that transition?
And if you can't enter here in this space, then just DM me the answer because that would be wonderful. I'm trying to figure out the impact of this idea. There's a lot of other things like HPD and there's a quite a few different things about this. Quite complicated topic and really want to make sure that I've done the due diligence before I put it out into the wild.
Elmer:
Okay Rondon very interesting question. I think one of the consequences of removing the reward pool for us would be that we would have to work on other ways for people to stay sticky. Now, I think that this is something that we all should have been doing anyway, because I do believe that we have a fungibility problem in the sense that none of the platforms that are on Hive right now currently offer anything non fungible.
Now, I'm not talking about non fungible tokens. I'm talking about the fungibility of what... Their service provides. So for instance, if you have an exchange, then that exchange, the tokens they offer, you simply go to the one that gives you the best deal. If you have an Uber, you can go to a lift. Whichever gives you the best deal now the reason why some of these big platforms are able to capture and defend a strong moat is because of the non fungible aspects that they were able to establish and then build an incredible lead on and without having the reward pool it takes away some of that ability, although I don't think that any of the platforms existing on Hive right now necessarily need it.
So I'm not really for ending it immediately, but I wouldn't have a problem with it if we all had a way to build non fungible value in a way that would capture and retain users beyond what the reward pool is able to provide. That's my point of view. And this is coming from someone who invested about 3 million in purchasing stake to use the reward pool to attract and retain users.
Khal:
Yeah, this is a great question. Ron. The rewards pool is something I've given a lot of thought to over the years. 1 thing I've been a big, I guess there's 2 big things for me, but 1 thing I've been a big proponent of is bringing it to the 2nd layer and each front end having their own way of rewarding users and there's a lot of different ways like it, it doesn't have to be a token.