There are a lot of well-funded projects with a common aim of growing Hive.
I'm not going to get into the effectiveness of those other than to put forward in one place my concept for an approach that would
- Be more effective.
- Require less overhead.
- Would be almost entirely fully refundable if it doesn't work out for any reason.
Why would it be more effective? Because
- It uses successful strategies already working right now outside of Hive.
- Attracted users would be incentivized to stick around. They would also be less likely to be put off.
- Most of the infrastructure and content is already here.
That second one is a key piece I think a lot of Hive misses. There are a lot of people out there who have only so much attention to give, and therefore want a highly curated niche experience for things they are super passionate about.
Don't believe me? Test for yourself, go to a subreddit, forum, or Facebook group about a niche topic, and post about, say, politics. You will get either cautioned or thrown out.
The Idea
My idea is to take one or two communities from Hive and give them standalone websites under branded domains, but still keep them as Hive under the hood.
You could do a whole bunch of them for a lot less $ than a Rally car or any of the other projects, plus being a combination of web2 and web3, there would be real-time stats using trusted third-party tools to see everything going on.
Why Front-Ends
- Brandable with domains, keeps to focused niche topic, and community identity
- Technical benefit, organic traffic, can include code and added functionality or even monetization
- Greatly simplifies user experience (they don't even need to know about crypto or Hive until it makes sense for them).
$
The most extreme bootstrapped version of this doesn't even need funding at all but of course, would take a lot more time and effort to see results.
These websites would have the regular costs associated with any website, hosting, domain, and so on. I would anticipate a community of a reasonable size would attract enough support in terms of votes, curation, tips, and delegation that would more than be covered but others would likely know better than me.
Some communities (eg @brofund and @stemgeeks) already have websites of various kinds.
In my idealized version, most of the "investment" would be to reward great content (which can be done with upvotes, but the greater the reward the higher the motivation) or compensate for time (eg. editor/code/admin).
With an advertising budget the whole thing can be accelerated, and using online advertising obviously allows for community oversight for where the money is going and the return on that investment.
All custom code would be open source and therefore useful for all communities or future projects.
A version of this can all be done by individual communities now just with some volunteer time. My WordPress plugin can pull in your community content into a front-end website on a domain already.
The next level up would be encouraging, incentivizing, and rewarding great content creators. Again, they do not need to know about Hive necessarily. Sharing rewards out of a central pot would be the most transparent option, based on agreed metrics.
Over to you
Someone is going to do this, maybe even someone on Hive, and there are a lot more ideas around this as a foundation, but I wanted to get the core idea planted today.
What do you think?
If I understand this correctly, you want to take individual communities like, say, Freewrite or Photography Lovers and give them branded websites using your Wordpress plugin. Is that right?
That's not really the best way to maintain security. Even with the best security protocols, Wordpress is easy to hack. You'd be better off building from the ground up.
What do you mean by easy to hack and what is from the ground up? What stack would we use?
I can't answer your question as I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea. I'm not sure what you're trying to do.
WordPress is ~40% of the commercial web, it’s plenty secure when set up and managed correctly.
Walk me through your thoughts, though. Do you have specific security concerns?
Plugins are easily hacked. Themes are easily hacked. Without auditing your specific setup, we're just talking about nebulous details, but I've worked with WP for 20 years. I know what it's capable of.
I’ve worked with it for 20 years too but I don’t think it’s inherently insecure 🤷🏻
You think it's inherently secure?
I think if you configure and administrate it correctly it is secure.
It is not a binary consideration:
Pointless debating this because it is clearly secure* given the case studies and the people/companies/brands/governments/projects successfully using it.
Also any alternative suggestions will have the same caveats.
All of that is well and good, but we got sidetracked. Apologies for bringing it up. I was really trying to understand your proposal. I had to read this again to understand. It sounds like you're promoting your WP plugin. Is it already developed? Where would someone find it?
Funnily enough there is a Hive Rally site that does something like this, but that community does not seem too busy. I think 3speak has some method to set up such community sites relatively easily.
I think the original idea of this blockchain thing was to be a substitute for reddit, but it lacked communities at the start. I think they hold a lot of potential as you can have an area with moderation to keep it on topic. We need to persuade communities to move over from reddit and FB, but they need some incentives.
I think it is vital to let new Hivers know that there is a broad ecosystem here with lots of communities and games. InLeo may be bringing DASH people, but they will have other interests.
I think we missed an opportunity when Splinterlands was creating thousands of accounts that may never have even looked at the blogging side. I understand that a lot were bots, but there would have been some people in there too. A while back it was hard to find mention of Hive on their site, but it is more prominent now.
The Hive brand needs to be better known as an alternative to the corporate platforms.
I've actually started building up a cybersecurity website to build up a community to help people pass one of the really hard cybersecurity certifications - I was intending to share some of the more generic content on Hive to try and drive traffic to the site... but I could totally think about sending traffic the other way too.
Facebook creators create content for ads on reels and other monetization. However, visitors engagement is really different.
Sorry can you explain what you mean?
Yeah, can't explain it now, sorry. I can't find a right word. How to say it, I'm blured.
Where can we find your plugin?
Man that Rally car is sure catching a lot of heat..