A few weeks ago I made a poll asking how others discovered Hive. I was quite surprised to see "other" as the 2nd most picked option. First was people found Hive from I friend. I was expecting that honestly. And marketing was 0, I want to discuss all of these findings my post today. Reading the comments was very interesting, and many people found Hive in unique ways. But a few stood out as a common way that people were on-boarded to Hive by its discovery of a certain dapp.
Splinterlands
I realized pretty quickly I forgot to list “Splinterlands” as a pick, as many comments came in during polling mentioning that is how they found Hive. In the comments it was the single most mentioned way of discovering Hive.
Many responses for Splinterlands, it came in second as "other" to the poll option "friend".
Jeff Berwick (The Dollar Vigilante)
The dollar vigilante came up a few times, that is really interesting. They have not had the best reception here on the Hive blockchain. So it is interesting to hear many of his followers found Hive this way. Jeff Berwick has talked about crypto for a very long time, so its great that a few people found Hive this way.
TSU
Another common response was a platform called TSU. I had no idea about it before I did this poll.
Marketing
Marketing got zero votes. This helps to validate my feelings about valueplan, as much of it is spent on marketing. Yet no one in my poll was on-boarded that way. 
I also did a poll on the question about marketing, and should we be using Hive to pay for it.
Some people support it, but most do not. To me and probably many others, it seems like we are wasting Hive funds on many projects that are seemingly not attracting new users or attention to the blockchain. It would be nice if we could put value plan up for vote and decide what the community wants to keep, and not leave it to the "gate keepers" to approve such spending. As I have said before I see no reason why every single thing paid out on valueplan could not be a DHF proposal. I am not sure if valueplan is just some relic of Steems past we kept using, but the DHF and proposal system seems like where all of these valueplan items should be going.
In conclusion much of the polls results I was expecting turned out to be true. Friends telling other friends is the most successful way of on boarding people on Hive. Splinterlands is a strong second, eight people mentioned this dapp. And I am really glad for that. Splinterlands in my opinion has been a great platform that runs on Hive as a Dapp, it has helped stress test the Hive blockchain with many transactions over many years. If Splinterlands stopped running on Hive we would see a large drop in transaction volume on the blockchain. And since Hive is fast and free with its transactions it just seems like the perfect place for a blockchain based game.
I am thankful Splinterlands has stuck around and moved off Steem after being censored and found a home on Hive.
Now with their proposal funded, I believe we will onboard many more new users as time goes on just through that dapp alone. And of course the power of "word of mouth" will do its magic as other people tell their friends about this cool platform called Hive.
So tell your friends about Hive, and maybe they will be the next success story. And enjoy the dapps running on Hive, as many of them have helped bring new users onto the blockchain as well.
