Let's Get More People On Hive
Yesterday I had an idea after trying something out that I'd never done before, and that gave me a follow-up idea that could be beneficial to Hive.
What Do People Hate?
Adverts. Nobody likes ads, let's face it. When we see something pop up that stops us from enjoying what we're watching on TV or YouTube, we instantly roll our eyes, and if you're anything like me, you switch off your mind for 20-30 seconds while it plays out.
With that in mind, let's talk about what the idea is, and how we can use it to our benefit here on Hive.
Reddit
Reddit has never really been my thing. I made an account 2.7 years ago, and barely used it, other than reading AITA, and Star Wars stuff... literally, that's about all I read on it when I joined, and then I found Hive and stopped going on it.
Yesterday, I went on and was floating around and decided to join a writing community, and one of the communities had a message pinned that allowed for members to add their stories to it for people to read and share their thoughts.
A lot of people were sharing links to their Google Drives, so I decided - feck it - I'll share a link to one of my short stories from Ecency. I rarely share my writing outside of Hive.
To my surprise, someone read it, gave me a bit of feedback and said they enjoyed it overall. They didn't mention Hive or Ecency, but I started thinking about it then.
What if members of our community here on Hive, who use Reddit, and other places online to their advantage share their work with people who are writing, reading, and who have never heard of Hive, which - I know it's not about the money but - can allow people to share their work somewhere they might be able to monetize it.
Don't Advertise It
By saying nothing about our chain, we can put forward this notion of, "oh, Hive? You haven't heard of it? Weird."
We can let people come here, read something, see it's earned some money, and wonder to themselves, "hey, how'd they earn money? I want money for doing what I'm doing elsewhere for free."
Boom: The thought bug has been released.
When I discovered Hive, I knew nothing about it, but I managed to sign up, check out the communities, find some places I wanted to hang out and write a few posts before being directed to Discord servers for further help and guidance.
If I can do it alone, so can anyone. I think we could all join in and do this, and in fact, the more links being submitted outside of here the better. Mine only got 1 comment, and I shared another elsewhere and only got a comment there too. Who's to say my 3rd share doesn't get some more attention than that? Who's to say yours doesn't get some attention too?
Is This Only For Writers?
No, this can be for everyone. I'm sure there are Photography communities, Music, Gaming, TV, Film, DIY, and Art. The possibilities are endless, but ten people are better than one, so the more of us looking and sharing, the faster we might attract people.
I mainly write fiction here, so that might be my main focus, but I'd encourage everyone to try it out.
One thing though; let's not just spam links and all, let's focus on commenting on pinned messages allowing for links, also, let's not share other people's stuff, because we want to be able to engage with anyone who wants to talk about what we shared.
Whether other people do it or not, is completely up to you, but I'm going to be sharing my short story posts outside of here, and hopefully, some people might get curious enough about Ecency, or PeakD to ask about it, or look it up and join off their own back
Thoughts?
I know we have things like Posh, which is great and obviously helps to spread awareness, but I think this can be just as good. I have 2 followers on Reddit, and both of them already know about Hive. I have 60 or so followers on Twitter, and most of them are people I know from Hive, so posting on both of those accounts isn't that beneficial.
This could be a nice way to help us grow a bit, without shouting into the void, or coming across like we're trying to sell something. Nonchalant, all the way.
I fully agree with this. I think this platform was originally intended as an alternative to reddit (hence the -----it name) and it could do a lot of the same things, plus earnings. I don't use that platform much, but I have posted Hive links elsewhere. I put a couple on the Drumeo Discord recently. If anyone asks 'what is this peakd thing?' then I will follow that up.
I think our first obstacle is brand recognition and that can be an issue as people may not realise that Hive/peakd/ecency/inleo are all part of the same thing. It is not very obvious when you go to them.
We can sell it as a generally good place to post and engage around whatever you are into. Once people express an interest then we can detail some of the advantages such as:
You did well to get into it on your own. Most people need some mentoring as we lack good tutorials.
Let's make 2024 the year that Hive really grows!
I'm with you on brand recognition. What I tend to do is always say "I posted this on Hive" rather than saying which front-end I used. No-one yet has asked about the front ends, but the reply I have lined up is just that Hive offers a choice of ways to post, entirely depending on preference and which features work you use most often.
Totally agree man, bring on 2024! I was just never into using Reddit, but joining the writing communities there and seeing it as a way of attracting people here means that I'll be using it a lot more. I've been talking to a bunch of people too, just about other stuff, so maybe it'll work.
Selling it as those 4 things is great. Get them in with the prospect of rewards and earning for being a part of social media, and all the benefits we have over everywhere else will make it a no-brainer to stick around.
You know what man, I never copped the it at the end of each. It was 100% intended to be Reddit-like. I actually discovered the fact that my account could log in to all the other accounts, and I discovered Keychain and set it up, by going through the Hive.io page and seeing what apps and games were there. All of that was within the first couple of days of joining.
I didn't know about the Reddit link for Steemit, that's a cool historical nugget.
Thanks
I think those four advantage points are good ones, but as you alluded to, they do require some understanding, which is sometimes brought on by bad experiences.
Like the account Ownership is really important to people when they or their friends have been deplatformed. So as you have said it requires some life experiences or a level of understanding many don't possess. But that just means we need to do a good job of explaing it.
:)
I assume that was the origin of the name. Steem was short for Esteem.
I like that Hive is run by the community rather than by a corporation and that we profit from it. This ought to be the future of social media.
Cool.
I like E-Steem too because it sounds like holding someone in esteem or admiration. Perhaps to cute for some, but a nice touch.
I also think a community run social media platform is the future.
If memory serves me right Justin Sun also bought or was awarded Steemit Inc., or whatever the administrative office was called, when he bought the so called “Ninja-Mined” cache of several million Steem. Then what happened next is a dark chapter in our history, but it did lead many of us to the fork and an evolved version of the former community.
So in a way he caused the evolution of Steemit to Hive away from a social media platform, which thought it was run by a community to one with much more community governance. And no CEO or corporate office. 👍
That sounds a good idea and I believe NOT advertising Hive is the way to go instead of spamming links across social media. POSH and the Zealy campaigns have proven a failure and should be put to bed!
Totally agree man, selling crypto things as adverts is rarely received well.
It's natural, and just leaves the thought bug there for people to come and explore what we have here.
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I like this idea ! All I do in Reddit currently is occasionally search it for things that Google won't tell me.
But I really, really like the idea of low-key messaging. We're very much in a "hard sell" era right now, and not hard selling could automatically make people sit up and take notice.
I'm getting really fed up with calls to my business by people who are absolutely determined to bulldoze through a 10-minute script, but can't answer the question of "if what you are selling is so good and such great value, why does it have to be pushed so hard, and wouldn't the price be better if it didn't have to fund wages and commissions for a team of salesmen ?"
Hive is all about being different, so making people's first contact non-salesy is a brilliant start 😀
Exactly! If we all find a few places on Reddit or other sites like that where we can submit some links we could do really well with the attention we could get. Absolutely about the hard sell era. If we don't push it, people won't get pushed away.
There's one writing community called r/writingprompts, or something to that effect. I think it would be a good place to post a link to your Sunday world-building prompts. There seems to be a good amount of people who check that community out and chat under posts.
The vast majority of what I produce isn't for a HIVE audience. My ttrpg content/reviews are shared on BlueSky because that's where my audience is - and even though we don't get referral data anymore in our analytics I can definitely tell that folks from outside the Hive ecosystem are coming and reading. Similarly, the blog posts I tied to my series of Vampire Survivor walkthroughs still get about 50-100 views a month and I posted those... a year/half a year ago.
I don't know if any of the passive pulls to the blog have turned into signups, but getting folks here definitely is something I've been keeping an eye on for the last year on my own accounts.
Same here, whenever I checked my analytics, it gets visitors that are outside Hive. I wonder too if one of those ever signed up after reading the blog or the reviews. One thing for sure is that our content is indexed and if we have the proper SEO write up, it pops up to certain audiences.
I'd never heard of the term SEO until a few weeks ago. Is there a way to incorporate that into our Hive articles?
Yes and yes. Will be telling you more about it once I get back from dentist 😄
Good luck at the dentist, and thank you chat with you then
So basically, if you're writing with SEO friendly guideline, it makes your content easily discovered by others who are looking for the type of post you're writing about. Here's sort of easy way to understand how SEO can be applied to Hive https://peakd.com/hive-174578/@pitboy/how-to-write-seo-friendly-post-on-hive
Although since that post published, google did a few tweak in their algorithm. This is their latest how-to's on creating people first content. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/creating-helpful-content
That guide basically your basic when creating a content that is searchable on google. However with the rise of AI, I am sure something on the horizon will pop out soon.
That's amazing thank you so much, I'm going to get my head down and read these, and see if I can incorporate a bit of this into future posts!
Yeah, letting them see what we have going on is a good start, even if they don't sign up it'll be in their head for the next time they see it.
I told Alonicus there, I found one writing community on Reddit called, r/writingprompts - think, and it might be a good place to share prompt links. The community seems pretty active and talkative there, so could be worth dropping some in and seeing what happens.
That's interesting, how can you see if you have readers from outside of Hive? I've never used any analytics tools while being here.
PeakD has an analytics section though it's not as robust as it used to be years ago. It only shows overall views now, but given how HIVE operates you can assume 98% of all views after a post has been on hive for two weeks are likely external views... It's rare that much of the community looks at old posts here unless they're markup guides or other hive-meta content.
Oh cool I'll check it out over PeakD! I don't use that one too often, cheers! Yeah that's safe to assume, usually the newests posts get the most attention within Hive.
Happy to point it out! You'll find it within the "Dashboard" and then "Analytics > Views and visitors" section:
The great things about this blockchain are the facts that you own your own account and that you can store text in an immutable way without gate keeper. with these two things, the world is your oyster to make it whatever you want it to be for yourself.
I am using it to document my work. Give something ephemeral and digital permanence. You seem to be writing a book in installments.
Eventually, when people realise that they own nothing of their digital self they won't be happy and come looking for Hive
There are still some things that need to be improved before we are ready for the masses. Namely, for me, it is search and content discovery. But hopefully, HAF will make this a lot better. If, I understand what it does correctly.
What's HAF? One of my gripes with it is the fact that searching for stuff doesn't seem to work. I've tried to find particular posts I read or even wrote months ago, and it's impossible to find sometimes.
No, I agree with you. Being able to feel safe about producing content knowing that we won't get banned, or have our accounts terminated is a great feeling. But, when I first joined it was for the money, because I knew nothing about the crypto/decentralised world. I do now, thanks to being here, and find the money is just a bonus.
In saying that though, money is a great motivator to get people in here, and when they discover more about the place that'll be what keeps them here.
HAF, from my understanding, is a continually updated database of the blockchain that Dapps can use to access information in a more streamlined way. I am no developer but I am hoping that this will be much more searchable than the blockchain and who knows maybe someone will use it to train AI to help find things. To me, it is one of Hive's missing features. There is so much data on the blockchain but it always seems to fall into the abyss after the 7-day curation window.
The money side of Hive is also a great incentive and I am hoping that a whole economy will develop so that people don't feel the need to just sell their Hive to turn it back into cash.
I fully agree with you! I was still telling my friend about hive today and he seemed so fascinated. The funniest part is that he made mention the fact that he couldn’t have stumbled on this platform anywhere else, and I actually agreed with him. Even if he did, he might not really think it’s a big deal. I think people feel like hive is too complicated and that’s why they don’t talk about it enough.
I found it really confusing when I first joined it, and spent most of my time on Discord servers asking questions. Now, I have a really good understanding, but I'm still not a pro. It's a lot to take in though, especially when just chatting with friends about it. People rather have a place they can just sign up, and discover. With Hive, it seems like we almost need to take books out and study to even create our accounts haha
I've typed crypto blogging sites into Google, and Hive doesn't even show up in most lists. Really, it's up to us to spread the word I think.
To grow the social networks and contributions at HIVE, I agree with you the organic way as you describe is likely the best forward. I would think it is best to comment to other peeps on whichever platform you/we like to be active. I noticed at X, that commenting to others brings more views and receives more replies, than when I make posts in my channel.
The thing for me - and likely for most of the HIVE peeps - is that when going into meaningful conversations in other networks, time is perhaps the limiting factor. But as mentioned it is perhaps the best - maybe the only way - to get new genuine social networkers to HIVE.
This is something I absolutely want to do. My blogs are anyways not part of any larger activity, and generally I would love largest reach of people to read it. The reason I have not shared a lot is cause I was under the impression that one needs to login to Hive to vote or comment. (Even vote is not that important but commenting seems important if anyone pops around and wants to drop a line) While reading your post I realized that i am mostly in the PeakD context always. Is it different if I post Ecency link instead, can a non Hiver comment on your posts?
This is something I absolutely want to do. My blogs are anyways not part of any larger activity, and generally I would love largest reach of people to read it. The reason I have not shared a lot is cause I was under the impression that one needs to login to Hive to vote or comment. (Even vote is not that important but commenting seems important if anyone pops around and wants to drop a line) While reading your post I realized that i am mostly in the PeakD context always. Is it different if I post Ecency link instead, can a non Hiver comment on your posts?
Interesting idea, certainly it is a good thing to get the name out there in front of pople and this is a very suttle way of doing this. It is worth a shot. I will try it on Twitter sonce I am not active on Reddit. If you are on Twotter let me know and I can follow you there.
Yeah, my Twitter handle is @KILLERWOT1
It's not a bad idea, I've currently submitted a few short stories to posts allowing for them to be shared/self-promotion. Whether it leads to people joining, I don't know, but it would be nice to see a few more users get here. The Redditors would be the best people too, since they're all about reading, commenting, and in general, creating content. Win, win, win.
It’s a good thing to spread the word when we can and see how it goes - it’s not going to be easy especially with algorithms and shadow bans but we can do it. I know of a number of people on here that came from other platforms and were attracted to this. I can’t spend any additional time besides everything I’m already doing lol so I look forward to those who can spend the time doing it!
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