As regulars to these pages might remember, my primary objective with this particular Hive blog was to explore the world of Hive's Level 2 communities.
As I continue to dive further into this particular topic, one of the issues I continue to ponder is that of whether Level 2 will ever get the traction — followed by the staying power — to be a meaningful attractor of people to the Hive ecosystem.
The World of Level 2 Communities
For the purposes of what I am doing here, I'm specifically interested in those Hive communities that have their own Hive-Engine traded tokens and their own tokenomics in addition to their own content creation platforms.
Although I am obviously a big fan, I can't help but have my doubts about some of what's going on here.
As I start to poke around more in these particular doubts I have I draw on my own community building experience from the past with conventional web 2, and building web communities through Facebook and old fashioned online message board forums.
The first thing I always bump into is a simple question of whether anybody is really able to get the numbers.
Way back when when we were doing this — and I'm talking 20 to 25 years ago — very little would happen in a community that wasn't relentlessly driven forward by a very strong leadership organization until the community hit what we liked to think of as "critical mass."
Critical mass would usually occur at somewhere between 2500 and 5000 members of whom we could count on about 5% to be authentically active. Put in terms of straightforward numbers that means 125-250 people a day who are actively contributing to the community.
At that point there is usually enough activity being generated by communitiy members that the founders of the community can take a step a little bit backwards and go from a role of actually driving the content, to more overseeing it as others drive the content.
It also seemed to be the kind of point at which a community had a better chance of long-term survival because its number of members and active members started growing at least as fast as the number of people who lost interest and went away.
Attrition rates are always higher in communities with low activity levels... hence the importance of the roles of those leading the way.
As far as looking at Hive's Level 2 communities I feel we are actually comparing apples to apples here because most of these communities from the past I had anything to do with were also niche communities centered around a specific interest or common hobby, as opposed to "general" communities.
This is just my opinion, of course, but I generally like niche communities a lot because of the very reason that they tend to be "stickier" than generalized communities. After all, if you join something because it is a particular hobby interest (or other interest) of yours you're more likely to stick with it than if you're just poking your nose into reading a general newspaper as it were.
What Do We HAVE, Here?
So is there anybody currently in Hive's second layer that actually can live up to that sort of criteria?
This year, I've been throwing my own effort somewhat into the "Proof of Brain" community which — in spite of having two actual working front ends and fairly solid tokenomics still doesn't have all that much activity.
What's more, it is a general interest community rather than a niche topic community.
The previous frontrunner in this particular arena was of course LeoFinance, which recently rebranded itself as InLeo. I sincerely hope they know what they're doing, because taking something specific like Finance, investing and crypto and instead going to being a general content community is typically a leap in a dangerous direction.
When you "go general," rather than Vice versa, you have to work that much harder to keep people interested in what you're doing. Hopefully it goes well for them!
Regardless, I am looking forward to further explorations in this area, particularly in terms of whether a community has any chance at being sustainable, and how it might (or might NOT!) add value to the overall ecosystem.
It's a lot of work to get something truly off the ground and giving it "wings!"
Thanks for visiting and having a look at my blog, and till the next one!
=^..^=
Posted using Proof of Brain
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