After a lot of thought and planning we're finally ready to announce our onboarding program we've been working on. In this post I'll be explaining what it is exactly, how it will run and why and I'm hoping to have a lot of trusted stakeholders apply to be part of our onboarding program after careful vetting to make sure we'll be able to provide some of the best numbers the chain may have ever seen before.
I'll be trying to explain my thoughts that went into this as well as I can, I'm sure parts will be missed as there's been so much going on and so many considerations that were removed over time from the process. This'll be to compare to the current onboarding gateways and why a lot of them get easily abused. With this we're hoping to also inspire other bigger curation projects on the chain to follow on our footsteps and create a win-win-win scenario for everyone involved and the whole ecosystem with it.
The problem
Some of the problems with the current signups are: you have to verify with an SMS, or pay for an account or expect abuse/fake accounts if only email is the main way to sign up.
Many prefer not to use SMS to verify in an age where databases get hacked on the daily and customer info is leaked to hackers who are getting more and more aware of crypto and how it can be used for ransom. At the same time there's a lot of people who want to remain anon in part of their online presence, we've seen this happen on Reddit on the regular and Hive gives people the same freedom. It's your activity that matters, not who you are.
Paying for an account is easy if you're already familiar with crypto, but we don't really have many options to pay for an account with fiat (except hivewallet created by @roelandp afaik) and there may be a lot of newcomers who have no experience with crypto so this option is not a great solution for them.
The last one, as we've seen time and time again people like to abuse, maybe they think they can get some free HP delegations they can use to earn some rewards for no effort (this'll become obsolete with RC delegations come next HF) or they just like to squat certain account names or start fresh when their abuse efforts are eventually busted.
Our solution
The OCD accounts have been claiming account credits for a while now, this has been possible due to the delegations sent to our accounts for curation so naturally we would like to put them to use as best as we can for the community and platform.
We have now set up certain bots on Discord where users with a role can create a link to an account creation through Hiveonboard and without SMS verification instantly have others create an account with the unique link.
So now some info on how everything works and why we decided to do it this way.
The reason these links are unique for each account is so that they can only be used once, at the same time since the bot is creating the links it'll track on who created them to keep the onboarder responsible for who they invited. This will mainly be to mitigate abuse, not only are we going to vet each onboarder we invite but also hold them accountable that if something really shady has occurred (accounts the onboarder has invited turned out to be plagiarisers/scam rings/etc) they'll be quickly removed and at the same time face consequences in forms yet to be decided. Currently there's mainly people sending others to the signup page or hiveonboard directly and it's not easy to know who invited who, if they used a referral link, that's a one time link that anyone can use, for instance someone planning on abusing could use my hiveonboard or peakd referral link. That's why our links will be unique for each new user you invite and one time only.
Now this may sound harsh and you may wonder why would anyone agree to becoming an onboarder. The fact is that through our methods they can't invite the wrong people by accident, of course there'll be a certain percentage that turn out to be foul on their own or misguided or just happen to turn bad later, there's plenty of examples of people doing this after years of being around either way. Not something in our control. What is, though, is who you're onboarding directly and through you they'll get a good chance of learning about Hive the right way.
Now let's talk incentives to both onboarders and the people they're onboarding which may make it clearer as to why it's worth getting involved.
The benefits
Our script that goes through hiveonboard.com to create our account credits is automatically set up to give onboarders a 3% beneficiary cut of posts of the onboarded users. 1% goes to hiveonboard for their service and 1% goes to @ocd for the account token. This is not mandatory, the users can at any time remove it but for starters it's not much of an issue as most likely they wouldn't be on Hive without the onboarder inviting them so it's a nice bonus for the work that goes into inviting and guiding them and making sure they have enough RC's to post.
On top of that we'll be running compilation posts for these as well, mainly on the @lovesniper account which is already focused on introduction posts although these will be separate. The onboarders will earn any rewards that those compilation posts earn due to the time and effort that goes into teaching newcomers how Hive works.
There will also be channels where onboarders will be able to nominate the posts of the users they've onboarded which not only gives them a good welcome but at the same time guarantees some beneficiary rewards as mentioned above.
Final thoughts
We believe this will be a powerful tool for onboarding and retention of new users and content creators. We have a lot of other incentives planned for active onboarders, needless to say if you're doing a good job at it those 3%ers along with compilation posts could turn out to be a nice income generation for those wanting to focus a lot more on onboarding.
OCD and our discord server will of course also always be a great place for newcomers to jump in and ask any questions they may have, find out how they can learn more about Hive and most importantly get connected to the communities where the leaders and curators there will be able to take over retention and engagement for the newcomers.
We believe this is an important step after our community incubation has shown a good amount of success over the past year and to be able to make good use of our account credits and have onboarders be able to more directly and through word of mouth be able to invite new users so they'll be faced with the advantages of Hive easier and won't be missed by curators. Naturally this will only be a part of OCD activities, we're not going to ignore other random newcomers that we've been trying to get to through @lovesniper which is made possible by a bot created by @rishi556 and all our other obligations of curation throughout communities. We have however sunset or "OG" compilation posts for the time being to make room for this and more niche communities.
During testing of our onboarding program, @purepinay has shown how effective it can be by creating invite links easily in our Discord, even sending QR code link invites to users to easily get to their Hiveonboard page and have a Hive account in minutes. She's also brought it to our attention that through this program she could host events to talk about Hive, invite more users at once, use Hivewallet (created by @roelandp) to show them how quick and feeless Hive and HBD transactions can be and how merchants could make use of it to accept Hive and (hopefully a soon to be very stable) HBD. This is something @ocd would love to fund and help get Hive and Hive accounts into more hands so we'll be looking into how we can make that scalable and what more there is that can be done in that regard. Thanks for giving this a testdrive @purepinay and expanding on it!
Alright, I've probably written way too much about this already. We'll be trying to also add some gamification to this program in terms of stats, who's onboarded the most users at certain times, who has the most active users and things like that with extra prizes as incentives to make this a fun and maybe a tad competitive experience for those who get motivated by it. Thanks also to @lemony-cricket for setting up our account creation scripts and discord bots to make this as seamless as possible! Last but not least, thank you to our delegators for making this possible, let's hope we'll run into problems where our voting power won't be enough to be able to support all the new users we'll manage to bring to Hive or that the Hive price catches up and makes that easier to deal with. :)
Thanks for reading! Stay tuned, we'll be writing an application post on @ocd soon for interested onboarders with a vouch system in place for trust. Make sure to follow @ocd and if you like what we're doing, we'd appreciate a vote on @ocd-witness and if you want to assist us with our curation, onboarding and retention, we have a delegation program set up on @ocdb where delegators receive daily liquid Hive from the curation rewards which can be tracked here!
I will start participating in this project, and it will be a nice challenge to find users whose stories will be written on the hive blockchain, it will be a nice adventure with side quests!
I hope it works. We get lots of new accounts (maybe 2000 per week), but that does not translate into active users. Maybe some projects are using RCs to create accounts for their own purposes, but we need real people. Then we have to keep them engaged. We gained a fairly big soccer influencer last week, but it remains to be seen how active he will be. It can take a lot of effort to coach a new user into how Hive works. We need network effects to give us a boost, but it can be a fight for each new user.
Keep up the good work.
Wow, tremendous thought, energy, and work seems to have gone into this. I haven't seen it in action, but it sounds fairly seamless and easy-to-use. Keeping an eye on gamification could boost things substantially too. Huge props to you, @purepinay , @lemony-cricket , @ocd , and everyone involved. 🙌
Thank you 😊 and thank you to @acidyo for this onboarding project and for recommending the hive wallet. Am getting more excited on this platform that is had the buy more Hive while it's dropping!
I think all Hivers should download the hive wallet. You can select the currency that you always use. Like this one, it auto converts the price of hive balance and HBD in your wallet in your preferred currency.
Though, it doesn't show the total account value since the main purpose of the wallet if to send and receive transactions, I think Ronald designed this so it's confusing to see so many number in your wallet. I do like the simplicity of it but maybe for others they would want the option to see the total value of their whole account. Maybe this could be added on the settings.
And oh may there is a way to update the profile photo? because I wouldn't want that background pic to show if I ever start using the qr code feature! Lol
Haha, well it's a beautiful photo, but there should be an option to change it or remove it, especially for QR code features, lol. 😁
Thank you too, I love your passion for this project and that you're introducing people to Hive Wallet. Where do I download it from?
I like simplified things, but I also like knowing the total account value, perhaps it could be a toggle in the settings as you say. 🙏
Hi, sorry quite busy making some graphics for the flyers and tarpaulin for the upcoming seminar. I'll talk to you soon.
Here's the wallet link ://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=app.steemwallet.roelandp&hl=en&gl=US
All good, wishing you lots of success with your flyers, and thanks for the link! 🙏
This sounds great. Will the onboarding program be open for new people? I reach 300+ unique viewers per day on my main platform twitch and have a decent amount of experience with blockchain (including Steem back in the day) -- would love to apply to be involved with this program if there's going to be any opportunities to do so.
Sure, but as I said we're going to do some vetting to make sure it's not "just anyone" that'll attempt to abuse this in some ways. Please apply in the post on the @ocd account once it's up and we'll get in contact with you about the details. :) Thanks for your interest!
Good idea about RC delegations! It's a smart solution. Glad to see changes on account creation, I like onboarding because I can keep some track about te activity of invited people, interface would remain? Many of my invited quit, I do my best, some of them have great success and adapt pretty well.
I think that would really help a lot a Google account creation. I write an extensive post about that, and another thoughts and ideas I working on, posted just today, hope you find some time to read it. I create a comparison with wax, TradingView compatibility, branding, promoting and Dapps
I want to write more about wax success and what strategies could serve us. They have a similar ecosystem with a massive expansion in little time. Now that SMTs are about to be released I think many people could be interested in build here.
Incubation program is only for communities? We have great games in a decent state of development, with sweet graphics (do you check oceanplanet? Is beautyfull) but with little HP on his accounts, maybe because the content of his players is sort of repetitive?
Is a golden era for cryptogaming, and in the middle of a pandemic we should growth much more and games are a great bridge for newcomers
I swear I didn't read before doing this...
But obviously, I have doubled down on the onboarding part. Be free to retweet the stuff... I just want more users to show the house around.
Posted via Blog | D.Buzz
I am in for this, I even do not know how I had missed all this OCD onboarding and curation project!!
Any way I will be waiting for that application post from the @OCD account and I see how to kickstart another wave of Hive users in my country Uganda.
Hey thanks dude.
I will use this hive onboard thing to invite people thanks.
Not sure if they will join but at least it stops me from having to create accounts for the people I have invited in Hive. Flip side some don't even use the accounts I set up for them and I don't like holding peoples keys for them in case I lose them because I have done that in the past for my self personally.
I lost my bitcoin wallet from 6 or so years ago when I was able to mine them. Yes.. I lost a few coins... lesson learned.. Then I got drunk one time and accidentally deleted my Steem/Hive key for my old account...
So yeah, hence why I don't like holding keys.. period. This will make it easy for me to just tell them where to sign up and its done for them automatically without me holding their hands.
Fantastic!! Can't wait to be a part of this 🙌🏻
This is a nice initiative to encourage not just new joinees but also the people who invites them and as you said, it's a win win situation for all at the same removing all those possible scenarios of abusing the system.
Happy to know that the delegations people are sending to @ocdb is making such new innovations possible besides the curation.
Thanks for all the efforts spent by all the people involved in it.
Looking forward to further updates and onboarding as many as possible :)
¡Me encantó! Excelente ayuda para los nuevos usuarios para que inicien en hive y es de mucha ayuda iniciar desde una comunidad, esta forma de trabajo es un intercambio mutuo y equivalente donde los dos se ayudan entre sí y mientras más crece el usuario más crece la comunidad. Es un crecimiento en cadena. Me parece una excelente idea.
I loved! Excellent help for new users to start in hive and it is very helpful to start from a community, this way of working is a mutual and equivalent exchange where the two help each other and the more the user grows, the more the community grows. It is a chain growth. I think it is a great idea.
I expect a lot from this initiative, it's about time we start recruiting new users for the blockchain, I feel there are still a lot of great content creators out there.
This is great news, Been wanting something like this.
Very helpful waiting for to be part of it. Happy to be here in Hive.
I think disposable links are great, just like goggle authenticator which can't be abused @acidyo
Have you seen http://signup.hive.io/ ?
You can sign up via ecency or threespeak just using an email.
I made one using ecency recently, had to fill out username I wanted + email.
They send me an email confirmation link, I click it.
A few minutes later they send me the password.
I think that's the simplest account sign up process I have seen yet, and it emailed me the password so I have a backup of it. If using protonmail which is encrypted one now has an encrypted backup of their password(though you should change your passwords after getting it created so that you are the only one with the keys).
Yes, unfortunately that's where most of the "1 intro post, no engagement or activity after unless you count powering down" accounts are coming from. Our onboarding is meant to have trusted users onboard other legit users and pave the way for their retention to be as high as possible through guidance, curation and incentives for the onboarders doing all the work.
That is good, defintely need people who are going to engage.
Are there people just spinning out intro posts and farming rewards? I have seen more and more intro posts getting upvoted lately. Wonder how profitable it is to just constantly make a new account and pretend to be new to milk the rewards, probably pretty profitable for some people in 3rd world countries. An interesting problem to have to solve for, hmmm.
Not sure what exactly is going on, but it has forced us to vote on intro posts a lot less to not encourage it and also take a few days waiting it out before voting to see if they get involved with some other activity before we decide on what vote we cast the intro post and/or curate another post of theirs as well.
Having just gone through the onboarding process and being confused pretty much the whole time, I'd say any progress is good progress.
@purepinay wohoooooo 🥂🍾😘👋🏼
Timely initiative. SMS verification or email verification is not enough only. Still we are failed to retain new users. That me be issue of gift delegation of initial stage. Well decision of now delegation. They will join who have interest to earn here. Unique referral link for each time is another initiative much appreciated. Initially, its hard to teach new comers about all the technology and way of writing is a tough job, and for that 3% is well enough. Lets fight abuse unitedly. Thank.
is this still on ??
i m late but started working on it
sounds really interesting and well planned
Good, please I need a vote or income
I need a vote too :(