I'm going to try and be as frank as possible about things, a lot of the things I mention may not be accurate and there may be different opinions about a lot of them. Some of my opinions may come off strong or biased but keep in mind this is just to bring some discussion forth and not meant to bring down any prior or future attempts at onboarding or ways to go about it.
I've done my fair share of onboarding, from bringing real friends from the past to the chain to inviting people I interact and have build relationships outside of this ecosystem (though not as much of the latter since Hive has pretty much taken most of my attention and focus the past few years). Retention rate isn't great and a big reason to that has felt are these things:
- Not a great selection of content
This one is a hard pill to swallow but it's just what it is, in a mix of discouraging just sharing posts and headlines of what's trending all over the internet right now and enforcing longer form content if you do talk about such news/trends, it discourages consumption of such longer content in a day and age where attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter and everyone wants the next fix of dopamine through consuming content as fast and often as possible. The other mix is that original content can't always be great from the same people over and over and with a low userbase it is hard to come by. We see this on Reddit every now and then where a user has something interesting happen to them or something interesting to share that's considered original content, but even there with millions and millions of accounts and lurkers these original posts don't occur often, it's mostly just sharing other things that have happened around the world and engagement being the forefront of entertainment in the comment sections. This isn't to be misunderstood with good authors and their content, that can occur consistently but it's not what is driving social media attention and hype these days, it's sensationalism and uniqueness of events and occurrances. As much as I love authors like 
I believe that's also a reason why Reddit never pushed Original content much because they know it's not what keeps people around and coming back. That said Hive doesn't need to be Reddit or other social platforms and there is a different kind of value in the way things work here which I personally really like but I don't think it's something that's going to interest the younger generations or older ones that have gotten used to how social media is these days as it may also be a reason why blogging has taken a downturn the past decade. Anyway, without making this post about that, let's move on to some other points.
- Getting started
While we really put value into people owning their own content and value and making sure they'll save their keys upon creating an account a majority of them, especially those coming from #web2 will ignore you no matter what. They're too used to the "I forgot my password" lifeline but even if they save the keys most of the time they're not going to save them properly resulting in issues in the future.
Getting started with your Hive journey by yourself is also difficult which brings me to many onboarding attempts even if/after you manage to easily get a free account/pay for one through the various account creation sites with their random outages, bugs, and roadblocks/restrictions. Not everyone uses Reddit as they mostly lurk on there and I'm comparing it to that because I believe the majory Hive front-ends compare to it best as to how similar they work, especially with communities in the form of subreddits. Just bringing people to hive.io or the account creation pages is not enough, even simpler front-end websites on web2 have simple tutorials and often times even force people to follow or subscribe to certain communities before you can even like or upvote something. This is something that's really lacking on Hive front-ends, simple short time tutorials showing you the basics and giving you a taste of what your feed could look like by recommending you communities based on your interests or consistent authors writing about the same interests. To many they're going to need to spend quite a lot of time on here browsing before they get to that stage of starting to subscribe to communities after finding them and authors after consuming some of their content on their own. I know this by personal experience by using Reddit wrong in the early days and only checking the front-page and my friends doing the same mistakes after not bothering to take my subreddit recommendations to make their feeds better. Another thing that Reddit does well now which it didn't before and our front-ends don't at all, is recommending you random subreddits and authors in your feed based on history. It's one of the best ways to get the user introduced to other communities and authors but we're too afraid to start tracking their activities even though most of them are fully public on this database we call a blockchain to make sure retention rates go higher.
- User acquisition
Aside from word of mouth, I see a lot of numbers thrown around that it should be okay to spend 20-30$ per user we bring to the front-ends comparing it to the rest of web2's different genre's as this picture was used recently in some discussions. (Keep in mind this post is still just about my general feelings and opinions on this matter and shouldn't be used to sway anyone into any actions)
Hive is a bit too unique in many aspects to be considered for any of these I believe as it can be any of them in the same time even if some of them are completely lacking as activity on here at this point in time. I also believe that just bringing people here in one way or another does not do much and if anything will just make them not wanna return later if the ecosystem is brought up again cause they'll remember how difficult it was to either get an account, understand what's going on (how people are earning, what these points on certain front-ends mean, that it's immutable text-based content, account ownership etc) or find something interesting at first glance to want to stick around for the content. For Hive this cost should be considered first after they've already had an account and gotten to perform basic actions that many would early on in their journey, such as writing their first post, following a few accounts, dropping a few comments and votes and seeing how it works, a lot of this isn't obvious in the beginning and many will never know any better after trying it out real quick and leaving never to return.
How can it be done better?
Okay, so this is the part where I might become a bit biased because I've been running certain initiatives and trying to improve upon them for some time now. I've talked about these in the past but they've yet to properly scale from interested eligible parties willing to participate and even those that do, retention is good and better than your general new accounts but it's still far from being great or something I'd wanna throw real money at to see scale aside from the little rewards we can direct from the pool towards these activities.
Also keep in mind that these are just my opinions but I'll try to explain why I believe so.
The first part I wanna discuss is user acquisiton with a guiding hand at the current infrastructure.
This one is a bit unique and won't affect a majority of users that come to our front-ends in one way or another but it has seemed to work rather well with minimal rewards/inflation directed towards it. What I mean by this is some of the onboarding initiatives we've been running through 
So, you may already notice I'm being biased but I believe I have reason to be in this case. While
Okay, let me now stop talking about our onboarding program and why I think that's something we could at some point try to see how it would develop and scale with some extra funding, and let me talk about an intiative I've talked about before a lot because I've personally been behind it doing the groundwork and growing a community from 0 to hundreds of active users in a matter of days.
Onboarding people already experienced with #web3 and active in platforms similar to Hive should be massively better than targeting random #web2 users.
Let me preface this by saying, yes, the market was at an all time high, the community that was "targeted" had a lot of hype around that time and Hive was close or nearing its ATH as well. With this in mind take note that I am sure this had a lot of effect and why it felt so easy at the time and I'm not going to get into the whole "this experiment is tainted due to rewards and monetary incentives" because it is what it is. Hive will always have rewards attached to it but also a lot more amazing things that web2 will never have.
The idea I had was that I should try grow a community based on the interest of one of my own interests, a "web3" game outside of the Hive ecosystem with users posting, commenting and curating content and discussions around it on Hive because this game and close to literally all other web3 projects don't have something like Hive. I liked the idea so much that I put $1k+ of my own money in assets towards giveaways and contests along with some help from 
In 2 days with a simple Reddit post and an announcement of the contest on their Discord I had players dm'ing me on both platforms for an account invite, many of them already on 
While the community now had dwindled down and isn't showing a lot of activity, a majority of these players may still play GU, may still have their keys saved somewhere and can return at any time to check this place out again. On top of that a lot of the players that joined got involved with Hive in different ways, some stayed active curating the community for OCD, some got involved with threespeak and many of them started playing splinterlands because they found out about it here.
The value of those couple days and those couple thousand $ (not counting curation of the community) had tremendous value for Hive and potential value for returning users in the future. Majority of that funding was sponsored by myself while at the same time doing all of the work, I can't imagine what we could muster if we had more constant funding and a bigger team taking care of not just the onboarding process but to also help them out with any questions they may have. Of course bear market arrived and is staying around for a long time now so I don't disagree that we're not going to see the same influx of users again in the same way but I think with a little bit of funding and activity doing this on a more consistent basis would bring in people with way higher retention rate, way better understanding of crypto and learning Hive faster and potentially even better holders/buyers of the token because a majority of these players/people quite simply don't know Hive exists and that they're missing out on something.
Web2 makes it insanely difficult to share legitimate projects, the coinmarketcaps and gecko's are filled with garbage high marketcap copycat projects that many never even go past the 2nd page to even scroll through Hive. We have something insane to offer those lacking it and already being knowledgable about the space yet it seems for some reason we keep focusing on brandnew people to crypto and blogging/reddit-like websites and thinking they'll stay if they just get pushed this way.
Alright this post again got pretty long so out of the risk of losing a lot of readers checking the wordcount I'm going to stop writing here. Point is, I think we really ought to focus on making Hive and communities a place where projects can not only ensure they're being transparent by allowing any and all discussions to exist and be readable if readers so choose, but at the same time showing people that their activity is worth something and that making some money in crypto doesn't always have to be "how to buy my memetoken on xxx" then go around shilling it because you invested into it. I'm not saying make the earning aspect the forefront of onboarding, but since it already exists and has improved a ton from the early days, we shouldn't make it taboo or never mention that it is possible if you put energy and time into it. We clearly have tons of success stories and good examples already so there's nothing wrong with sharing some of that inflation with the rest of the crypto space as long as they're here and using Hive for their own interests.
While we still have a lot of things to fix as mentioned in the beginning of the post, I think there's value to put some marketing effort and funds not just on bringing the users here but also on people who take the time to welcome and guide them and make sure to target those that have an edge over retention compared to those completely oblivious to how crypto works.
Anyway, got pretty tired writing all this so will take a break before I may reply to comments, thanks for reading those who did.
