Why Spanish-Speakers Stay on Hive

[demotruk]

And What It Would Take to Replicate It Elsewhere

Foreword — by @demotruk

This post is a direct follow up to my data analysis post of the #introduceyourself tag. There, the standout finding was the impact of Spanish language and possibly language density on user retention. This deserves its own deeper dive, so once again I have worked with Claude to dig into what the data tells us.

The result: there is a lot of potential for improved growth that we are not yet exploring like we should.

---

Update (2026-05-07): This post has been corrected based on feedback from @danielvehe. @mballesteros's location was corrected from Spain to Venezuela, and the pre-Aliento history now properly credits Rutablockchain and @cervantes funded meetups as earlier onboarding infrastructure. See the inline correction notes for details.

Research Findings — by Claude Opus 4.6

This analysis was conducted at @demotruk's direction, building on the community density finding from the #introduceyourself post and the rewards-retention work in the earlier analysis. I designed the study, wrote and ran the queries against HiveSQL, analyzed the results, and drafted these findings. @demotruk directed the investigation and reviewed the results. Everything below is verifiable on-chain, and the SQL queries are available on request.

---

The Starting Point: A 14pp Retention Gap

The #introduceyourself analysis found that Spanish-tagged first-posts retain at roughly double the rate of non-Spanish first-posts — consistently, across every cohort year from 2017 to 2023. That post identified the gap but didn't decompose it. Three plausible explanations presented themselves:

1. Language community — Spanish-speaking newcomers land in a dense, in-language subcommunity that welcomes and supports them.
2. Economic motivation — many Spanish-speaking Hivers are Venezuelan, and a few dollars in HBD can be life-altering in a hyperinflationary economy.
3. Venezuelan-specific culture — maybe this isn't a "Spanish" effect at all, but something unique to Venezuela's relationship with this blockchain.

These aren't mutually exclusive. The challenge is separating them. @demotruk's first instruction was to stop treating "Spanish" as a single category and break it by country.

Investigation 1: Is It Venezuelan, Not Hispanic?

Country-level retention

Using profile.location fields from the Accounts table (more reliable than post-level country tags, which only 27% of Spanish first-posters use), I split the 2023 Spanish-tagged cohort by country:

Country	Spanish-tagged	n	Retention
Cuba	Yes	95	55.8%
Venezuela	Yes	414	45.4%
Argentina	Yes	26	42.3%
Other location	Yes	170	42.9%
No location set	Yes	553	21.9%

For comparison, the non-Spanish baseline:

Country	Spanish-tagged	n	Retention
Venezuela	No	348	19.8%
No location	No	4,758	13.9%
Other location	No	3,347	27.0%

Two findings jump out immediately.

Finding 1: Cuba leads, not Venezuela. Cuban Spanish-tagged newcomers retain at 55.8% — 10 percentage points above Venezuela. Cuba only appeared at scale in the 2022 cohort (n=75, 40%) and grew further in 2023. This is a new and fast-growing community, not just a Venezuelan spillover.

Finding 2: Non-Spanish Venezuelans retain at baseline. Venezuelans who don't use the Spanish tag retain at 19.8% — statistically indistinguishable from the 19.1% unclassified baseline. Same country, same economic pressure, but without community membership, no retention advantage.

This second finding is the critical one. It rules out pure economic motivation as the explanation. If Venezuelans stayed because HBD matters in a hyperinflationary economy, all Venezuelans would retain at elevated rates, regardless of whether they tagged their posts in Spanish. They don't. The retention boost requires community membership.

But community membership alone doesn't explain the full picture either

Consider: Spanish-tagged users with no profile location — who may or may not be Venezuelan — retain at only 21.9%. That's barely above the non-Spanish baseline. If in-language community were the whole story, any Spanish-tagged user should benefit, regardless of where they're from. The high retention seems to require both community membership and something else.

That "something else" starts to look like economic motivation when we check the longitudinal data.

The time dimension

To test whether the retention advantage is a recent phenomenon or something structural, I pulled yearly cohorts from 2017 through 2022:

Year	VE + Spanish	Retention	Non-Spanish baseline
2017	n=1,945	54.6%	18.4%
2018	n=6,053	32.3%	16.0%
2019	n=770	14.5%	14.6%
2020	n=555	46.9%	10.5%
2021	n=1,266	47.9%	14.5%
2022	n=559	43.7%	14.3%

The 2019 collapse is telling. During the crypto winter, Venezuelan+Spanish retention crashed to 14.5% — matching the non-Spanish baseline exactly. When HBD lost most of its purchasing power, the economic lever stopped working, and community membership alone wasn't enough to keep people.

Note also: 2017 retention was 54.6%, before Aliento was founded (March 2018). The community density effect predates Aliento's curation infrastructure. As @danielvehe pointed out, earlier onboarding structures were already active — notably Rutablockchain (co-led by @danielvehe and @enmy since October 2017), which ran a structured onboarding process with pre-screened accounts and intro post review, alongside meetups funded by @cervantes. Aliento didn't create the effect — it scaled and formalized something that earlier community projects had already established.

Three Stacked Effects

The pattern across these cuts points to three separable retention effects:

1. Profile commitment (+6pp). Users who set any profile location — regardless of country — retain ~6 percentage points higher than those with blank profiles. This is an effort signal: the act of filling out your profile correlates with higher baseline engagement. It's not causal in the way the other effects are, but it's a confounder we need to account for.

2. Economic motivation (+11pp). Among users with profiles set, Venezuelans without Spanish tags retain at 19.8%. Venezuelans with Spanish tags retain at 45.4%. But the non-Spanish Venezuelan rate (19.8%) is itself elevated above the no-location baseline (13.9%) by about 6pp — that's the profile commitment effect. The economic motivation effect is visible in how non-Spanish Venezuelans compare to, say, non-Spanish Americans (25.4%) or non-Spanish Brits (24.6%). It's there, but it's modest without community membership.

3. In-language curation infrastructure (+10pp minimum). The gap between non-Spanish Venezuelans (19.8%) and Spanish-tagged Venezuelans (45.4%) — a 26pp difference that can't be explained by economics alone, since both groups face identical economic conditions — represents the combined effect of community membership and the curation infrastructure that comes with it. After accounting for profile commitment, the curation infrastructure adds roughly 10-20 percentage points.

The 2019 crypto winter provides the natural experiment that separates these effects. When the economic lever collapsed, the curation infrastructure effect collapsed with it — suggesting the two are multiplicative, not additive. Curation infrastructure amplifies economic motivation; without something worth staying for economically, even a welcoming community isn't enough.

Investigation 2: A Global Natural Experiment

If the retention advantage requires both economic motivation and community infrastructure, we should be able to find natural control groups: countries with economic motivation but no community infrastructure, and countries with neither.

@demotruk suggested building a 2×2: economically distressed English-speaking countries (economic motivation, no in-language curation) versus rich English-speaking countries (neither). This gives us a natural experiment.

Multi-country retention

I pulled retention rates for all identifiable countries, pooling the 2021-2023 cohorts for sample size:

Country	n	Retention	Economic pressure?	Community infrastructure?
Cuba + Spanish	187	49.2%	High	Yes (Aliento + HiveCuba)
Venezuela + Spanish	2,263	46.4%	High	Yes (Aliento, Rutablockchain)
Ghana	76	47.4%	High	Unclear (small n)
Ukraine	111	46.9%	High (war)	Unclear
Mexico + Spanish	39	46.2%	Moderate	Yes (Aliento)
Spain + Spanish	58	55.2%	Low	Yes (Aliento)
Argentina + Spanish	94	41.5%	High	Yes (Aliento)
Indonesia	843	37.4%	High	Partial (legacy Steemit community)
Nigeria	1,527	36.0%	High	No
Philippines	862	35.3%	High	Partial (Cebu teachers)
Bangladesh	342	35.4%	High	No
India	505	31.5%	Moderate	No
USA	820	25.4%	Low	No
UK	203	24.6%	Low	No
Unclassified, non-Spanish	35,394	19.1%	Mixed	No

The 2×2 resolves cleanly:

• Economic pressure + community infrastructure (Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Argentina + Spanish): 41–55% retention
• Economic pressure + no community infrastructure (Nigeria, Philippines, Bangladesh): 35–37% retention
• No economic pressure + no infrastructure (USA, UK): 24–25% retention
• No economic pressure + community infrastructure (Spain + Spanish): 55% — the most interesting cell

Spain + Spanish at 55.2% retention (n=58, small but consistent across years) suggests that community infrastructure can deliver high retention even without economic pressure. That's a small sample, but it's the right direction for the hypothesis.

Nigeria's 36% — achieved with zero community infrastructure — shows how powerful economic motivation alone can be. Nigerian newcomers retain at nearly double the rate of Americans, despite receiving far less curation support (as we'll see below). If Nigeria got even basic community infrastructure, the data suggests retention could climb significantly.

Investigation 3: What Does "Community Infrastructure" Actually Look Like?

To understand what separates these tiers, I examined the curation infrastructure serving each country's newcomers. I pulled the top voters and commenters on first-posts from the 2023 cohort for Venezuela+Spanish (via Aliento), Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Aliento: A full-stack curation community

The top voters on Aliento community (hive-110011) first-posts in 2023:

Voter	Votes on first-posts	Location
@ajolote	700	Aliento mascot account
@roelandp	564	Netherlands (witness)
@amaillo	400	Venezuela
@theycallmedan	380	—
@thevil	368	—
@flywithmarlin	367	Venezuela
@mballesteros	357	Venezuela
@aliento.love	356	Aliento curation account
@aliento	350	Official Aliento account
@enrique89	349	Venezuela

The curator team is pan-Hispanic, not purely Venezuelan: Venezuelan, Mexican, Colombian, and Cuban curators all appear in the top 50. @mballesteros (Venezuela) voted on 357 first-posts. @pacoandujar (México/España) voted on 322. @manuphotos (Cuba, founder of HiveCuba) voted on 261. @dagmardeeke (Mexico) voted on 288.

This matters: it means Aliento's curation infrastructure serves the entire Spanish-speaking community, not just Venezuelans. A Cuban newcomer lands in the same curation ecosystem as a Venezuelan or Argentine one.

(Correction: an earlier version of this post listed @mballesteros as based in Spain, based on their HiveSQL profile location. @danielvehe pointed out that mballesteros is Venezuelan. This has been corrected above. The pan-Hispanic characterization of Aliento's curator network still holds via @pacoandujar, @manuphotos, @dagmardeeke, and others, but the specific claim of a Spain-based curator in the top 10 was wrong.)

Nigeria: Zero community infrastructure

The top voters on Nigerian first-posts:

Voter	Votes	Location
@brittandjosie	153	Netherlands (@heyhaveyamet)
@newageinv	128	—
@jamerussell	119	—
@heyhaveyamet	116	Welcome initiative (Netherlands)
@xcountytravelers	110	—
@fraenklovesyou	110	—

Not a single Nigerian-located account appears in the top 50 voters on Nigerian first-posts. The votes come from @heyhaveyamet (a generic welcome initiative run from the Netherlands), scattered whale accounts, and OCD trail followers. There is no Nigerian Aliento. There is no in-community curation infrastructure at all.

Philippines: The comment layer

The Philippines presented a puzzle. Filipino first-posts received more average votes (284) than Venezuelan+Spanish ones (219). But when I pulled the voter list, the picture was different:

The top voters were @roelandp (132), @olaunlimited (126), @ocdb (123), @ocd (122), and a long tail of ~120-vote accounts — the flat signature of an OCD auto-voting trail. Only one Filipino account (@juecoree, 113 votes) appeared in the top 50.

@demotruk suspected the high vote counts were trail-inflated, not community-driven. He was right. But when I pulled the commenters, a different picture emerged:

Commenter	Posts commented	Location
@hivebuzz	159	Bot (badges)
@lovesniper	124	OCD intro bot
@guruvaj	104	Batangas, Philippines
@brittandjosie	60	Netherlands
@pizzabot	49	Bot
@netswriting	41	Cebu, Philippines
@intoy.bugoy	41	Cebu, Philippines
@jobeliever	41	Cebu, Philippines
@dehai	41	Cebu, Philippines
@missleray	40	Tabogon, Cebu

Below the bots and generic welcomers, a Cebu-based network of teachers actively comments on every Filipino newcomer's first post. @guruvaj (Batangas) anchors the network with 104 posts commented. Below him, roughly 15-20 Cebu-based educators — @selflessgem, @missjoycee, @amoreyl, @callmesmile, @simplybil, and others — each commented on 10-40 first-posts.

There's also @chinito, who describes himself as "Founder of Filipinos of Hive (FOH)" — evidence of deliberate community-building, not just spontaneous welcoming.

Three tiers of infrastructure

This analysis reveals three distinct tiers:

Tier	Example	Voting	Commenting	Retention
Full-stack	Venezuela+Spanish (Aliento)	Dedicated community curators	Personal, in-language	46%
Comment-only	Philippines (Cebu teachers)	OCD auto-trail (generic)	Personal, in-community	35%
Nothing	Nigeria	Generic whale votes	@heyhaveyamet only	36%

The Philippines has organic community commenting but outsources its economic signal to OCD's generic curation trail. Aliento provides both: dedicated voting (economic signal that says "your community values this") and personal commenting (social signal that says "we see you and welcome you").

The interesting puzzle: Nigeria retains at 36%, matching the Philippines' 35%, despite having no community infrastructure at all. This is the economic motivation effect in isolation — Nigerian newcomers stay because HBD has real purchasing power, even without anyone welcoming them. If Nigeria developed even the Filipino-level comment infrastructure, the data suggests retention could climb meaningfully. If it developed Aliento-level full-stack curation, the jump could be dramatic.

Investigation 4: Engagement Density by Country

To quantify the welcome experience, I measured engagement density on first-posts across countries: average distinct voters, average distinct commenters, time to first comment, and percentage of first-posts that received any comment at all.

Country	Retained?	n	Avg voters	Avg commenters	First comment (min)	% got comments
VE + Spanish	Yes	185	219	10.4	112	98%
VE + Spanish	No	226	147	7.1	299	90%
Philippines	Yes	94	284	13.5	180	87%
Philippines	No	179	144	8.0	1,798	87%
Nigeria	Yes	114	97	8.0	248	92%
Nigeria	No	267	61	4.9	526	79%
Indonesia	Yes	24	60	4.8	350	88%
Indonesia	No	69	12	1.9	631	58%
USA	Yes	34	56	5.2	1,161	74%
USA	No	140	19	1.8	2,809	42%

The time-to-first-comment metric tells the story most clearly. A Venezuelan+Spanish newcomer who will later be retained gets their first comment in 112 minutes — under two hours. A Filipino newcomer waits 180 minutes. A Nigerian newcomer waits 248 minutes. An American newcomer who will not be retained waits 2,809 minutes — nearly two days.

For non-retained Americans, 42% received zero comments at all. For non-retained Venezuelans in the Spanish community, only 10% received zero comments. The welcome experience is categorically different.

The Filipino vote counts (284 average) are higher than Venezuela's (219), but this is trail inflation — 120+ accounts auto-following OCD's vote. The quality of that engagement is different from 10 personal curators each evaluating your post. A trail vote is an economic signal without a social one. Aliento's votes carry both.

Investigation 5: The Unplugged Opportunity

@demotruk asked whether it's worth expanding retention efforts to new countries or deepening the existing Latin American pipeline. To answer that, I looked at "unplugged" Venezuelans: users whose profile says Venezuela and whose first post body appears to be in Spanish, but who didn't use any Spanish-language tag.

In the 2023 cohort, I found roughly 280 Venezuelan first-posters who didn't tag their posts with spanish, espanol, or related tags. Of these:

• 107 posted on Liketu (hive-147010), of which 57 had likely Spanish-language body text
• 39 posted on DBuzz (hive-193084)
• 18 were already in the Aliento community despite not using the Spanish tag
• Roughly 150 per year are addressable: they're posting Spanish content through non-Spanish-tagged channels

These users are currently invisible to the Spanish curation infrastructure. A simple automated detection — checking for Spanish-language body content combined with Venezuelan profile location — could route them toward Aliento's curation pipeline at near-zero marginal cost. At the observed retention difference between Spanish-tagged and non-Spanish-tagged Venezuelans (45.4% vs. 19.8%), routing even half of these users could retain an additional ~19 users per year from a population that currently retains at baseline.

That's a small absolute number, but the cost is essentially zero — it's a detection and routing problem, not a resource allocation one.

What This Means for Hive

The three levers

This analysis identifies three retention levers with very different cost/benefit profiles:

Lever 1: Route unplugged Hispanics. ~150 addressable users/year posting Spanish content without Spanish tags. Near-zero cost — requires automated language/location detection and routing to existing Aliento infrastructure. Expected yield: ~19 additional retained users/year. This is the cheapest intervention.

Lever 2: Saturate the existing Hispanic pipeline. Aliento's curation infrastructure serves roughly 800-1,000 Spanish first-posters per year (those who tag and are in-community). But there's headroom — 553 Spanish-tagged users with no profile location retain at only 21.9%, suggesting they're tagged but not fully plugged in. Deepening community engagement for this group (Discord outreach, faster comment response, stronger curation coverage) could lift their retention closer to the 45% observed for location-identified users. Moderate cost, moderate yield.

Lever 3: Build infrastructure for a new community. Nigeria is the most obvious candidate: 1,527 first-posters pooled across 2021-2023, 36% retention with zero community infrastructure, and an English-speaking population that eliminates the language barrier. But building a "Nigerian Aliento" from scratch — finding and training community curators, establishing a Discord/Telegram presence, securing delegation for curation votes — is a high-cost, uncertain-outcome project. The Filipino experience shows that organic community formation is possible (the Cebu teacher network emerged without any formal project), but it took years and still lacks the voting infrastructure that makes Aliento effective.

The broader lesson

The deepest finding in this analysis is structural: retention on Hive is not primarily an individual-level phenomenon. It's a community-level one. The difference between 19% and 46% retention isn't explained by individual user quality, content quality, or even reward levels (though all of those matter). It's explained by whether the newcomer lands in a community that has built the infrastructure to welcome, support, and retain them.

This has implications beyond the Spanish-speaking community. Every subcommunity on Hive — whether defined by language, geography, topic, or platform — faces the same structural question: do they have the curation density to retain newcomers? The data from this analysis suggests that the threshold for effective retention infrastructure is not impossibly high. It requires:

1. A small team of dedicated personal curators (Aliento operates with roughly 15-20 active curators across multiple countries)
2. Fast comment response (under 2 hours for the best-performing community)
3. Consistent voting coverage (Aliento's distinguishing feature from the intro-tag analysis was systematic floor-level support: 81-85% of newcomers receiving at least $1)
4. Economic motivation that makes small rewards meaningful (the 2019 crypto-winter collapse shows this matters, though Spain's high retention suggests it's not strictly necessary)

The cheapest intervention is Lever 1: route the users who are already posting Spanish content but aren't connected to the curation infrastructure. The most ambitious is Lever 3: replicate what Aliento has built for a new community. The evidence suggests both would work — the question is whether anyone is willing to build it.

---

Caveats

• Profile location is self-reported and incomplete. Only ~40% of accounts have a usable location string. Users with no location may differ systematically from those who fill it in, which is why the "no location" group retains at lower rates across all categories. This is an effort-signal confound, not a geographic one.
• Country classification uses LIKE-matching on location strings. Some matches are noisy (e.g., "usa" appears in "Maracaibusano"). We validated against a vocabulary of ~8,000 literal location strings categorized by region, but some misclassification is inevitable.
• Small samples for several countries. Cuba (n=95 in 2023), Spain (n=58 pooled), Argentina (n=94 pooled), and several others have sample sizes where individual users meaningfully shift the retention percentage. The main comparisons (Venezuela n=2,263, Nigeria n=1,527, Philippines n=862) are robust.
• Engagement density is correlation, not causation. Users who receive 10 comments may have written better introductions. The engagement metrics describe the environment a newcomer lands in, not necessarily the cause of their retention. However, the cross-country variation — where the same platform produces radically different engagement environments for different communities — argues against a pure selection story.
• "Retention" is defined as any top-level post 90-180 days after account creation. This captures medium-term engagement but not long-term commitment. A user who posts once at day 91 and never again counts as "retained." The relative comparisons between groups are still valid, but the absolute retention percentages overstate long-term engagement.
• The "extraction critique" — whether economically distressed user communities create or extract net value — is not addressed in this analysis. Prior work on Granger causality between user activity and price and the rewards-retention gradient suggests that user retention is net-positive for the network, but a direct cost/benefit analysis of community-specific value creation versus reward-pool draw would strengthen the argument. That's a topic for future investigation.
• OCD trail inflation means raw vote counts are misleading as a measure of community support. The Philippines' 284 average voters versus Venezuela's 219 would suggest stronger Filipino curation — but the Filipino votes come from an auto-trail, not personal evaluation. Commenter counts and time-to-first-comment are more honest measures of community engagement.

---

Correction (2026-05-09): An earlier version of this post described @heyhaveyamet as a "welcome bot." It is not — it is a manually operated welcome initiative, run by @brittandjosie and @jamerussell until April 2024, and then by @jamerussell alone. The text has been corrected.

Data: HiveSQL, queried May 2026. Cohorts: 2017-2023 account creation years, with retention measured as any top-level post 90-180 days after account creation. Country classification by profile.location LIKE-matching. Language classification by json_metadata tag detection (spanish, espanol, español, esp). Queries available on request. For the full retention series, see @demotruk's collection post.

Comments

[artofwar74]

Hmmmm, how much are the users earning in these communities and how much is actually being powered up? While retention rates are high, are these users benefiting the economy or just draining it? If they are draining it, is seeking a higher retention among them a good idea? Are the earnings the only reason they are being retained?

[demotruk]

I am glad you asked. I'll have a post on exactly this question soon.

[danielvehe]

Here are the top 10 in:
Rewards
HBD savings
Hive Power

[aliento]

Hey @demotruk, thank you for these reports; they are amazing.

We would like to add some context about the Aliento Project.

Even though the account was created in March of 2018 and the project started that year, it oonly was only active for a few months. It wasn't until around August of 2020 that the project really took off or started. So Aliento really started in Hive and not in Steem.

And as you mentioned, we didn't start the movement, but we reinforced it. The #spanish tag, I believe, was created or set as a standard for the Hispanic community by @cervantes in 2017.

Aliento started as a project to help users who had questions about Hive, and from there it has evolved. At the same time, we were curating content with the goal of retaining users, and our curation trail was followed by @theycallmedan and other whales who have supported the project. Before the curation curve or window changed back in 2021 or 2022, we were able to achieve an APR of 18% or even 21%.

We also have a Discord community with almost 2,000 members, not all of them are active, but it has been a hub where new users can ask questions, get support, and meet other Hivers. In the past, it was also a place where community leaders could nominate posts similar to how OCD does their curation, but in 2024, we changed that model, and the curation is made directly by the Aliento Curation team. In this post, you can check the communities that we have supported over the years. Not all of them are active anymore.

Four years ago, we started our witness nodes, and we also started creating some apps and tools for Hive. Besides curators and content creators, in the team, we have marketing and technical members.

In the past, we have also sponsored events and gatherings. And we have helped Hivers who have gone through tough times, check @aliento.aid.

This is a small summary of what we have done, but what we want to point out is that Aliento is not only an onboarding or curation project; it's much more than that, and it's a project that keeps evolving and growing. And of course, we are not perfect; we have made mistakes in the past, but we have learned from them.

• @eddiespino (Founder of Aliento)

[jamerussell]

@demotruk, thank you for the report work you are doing, but I need to make a clarification for you: @heyhaveyamet does not use any bot in any way, shape, or form, it was Brittandjosie and myself until April 2024, and then it was only me until a couple of months ago when I went on a haitus.

[demotruk]

Apologies for that error, and thank you for the correction. I have added a correction to the post.

[guruvaj]

I am mentioned here‼️🇵🇭‼️
Yes, the HivePh/DBuzz(I am the only that represent @dbuzz) is still here. Strong and active

[katriel1]

I've tried posting on Dbuzz and it won't let me get rewards. A magic pencil icon appears; what's the point of that pencil?

_{via Apps from}

[aliento]

You can read about that in this blog form @dbuzz: https://peakd.com/dbuzz/@dbuzz/the-dbuzz-journey-building-for-freedom-learning-about-incentives

The "magic pencil" means that all author rewards go to the DHF (@hive.fund).

[albertocova]

Hola amigo como estás ? Soy venezolano y verdad hive ha Sido de mucha ayuda para todas mis necesidades incluso una vez se me partió la Mica de mi teléfono y un hiver me obsequio 20 hbd para comprar una nueva pantalla, me ha Sido de vital importancia tomando en cuenta que el salario en Venezuela está pulverizado ..

[mydempire]

Very thoughtful post and an important perspective. Hive is truly supportive for people living in countries facing economic pressure. For many users, it becomes more than a social platform — it becomes a place to learn, connect, and earn through their efforts. Thanks for sharing this insight.

[katriel1]

I'm from Venezuela, I always use the Spanish tag, and honestly, the only projects that support me are @hispapro and the @enlace project with their modest vote. If it weren't for Inleo and @ecency, I would have already left Hive.

_{via Apps from}

[ylich]

I'm surprised not to see any impact from the curation project by @la-colmena, given that it started in 2018 and has consistently received trail voting from @curie, in addition to its work guiding new users and training new curators. The project has focused solely on Spanish-language content.

[demotruk]

I will get it to follow up on this.

[ylich]

👍

[muhshrooms]

En simple modos, por lo que entiendo después de leer todo esto y ver los datos, la razón de los habladores de la lenguaje español que se quedan más que los demás, es por 2 cosas que lo demás an dejado de seguir.

Les dan recompensas rápidas y les dan atención y respetado y valuado. Cuando la gente sientan eso, es mucho más probable que se quedarán. Y los datos aquí refleja exactamente eso.

Gracias.

[friendlymoose]

Very interesting stats again!
The different percentage of retention of people with financial incentives and those who don't is huge.
It is understandable though. But I also think it would be good for Hive if more people without a financial incentive would stick around. That would probably drive the price up instead of down.

And I also think it would be better for the diversity of the content on Hive.

Thanks for sharing this!

[katriel1]

I partly agree with you. When a user stays because of the community and not just the voting, the network becomes immune to market cycles ("crypto winters"), preventing retention from plummeting when prices drop. However, we also need reward-motivated users;

both factors are two sides of the same coin in Web 3. We need reward-motivated users; that financial incentive is, in many cases, the engine that drives consistent activity, improved content quality, and initial adoption in regions where a few dollars make a real difference.

However, my opinion is that rewards attract users, but the community retains them. As the analysis shows, when the financial incentive falters (as in bear markets), users who are only after the money tend to leave, while those who have forged bonds with the community stay, protecting the network from total collapse.

In my case, as a professor in Venezuela, I experience this balance daily. I use my earnings to cover expenses, which validates Hive's financial viability, but I prefer to reinvest in my Hive Power and actively participate in Hive and InLeo because I believe in the platform's long-term value. Ultimately, the ideal is a network where financial incentives help us grow, but a strong sense of belonging makes us resilient to market cycles. I believe in a balance between the two. Significant investment and confidence in Hive from major investors would be ideal.

_{via Apps from}

[friendlymoose]

However, my opinion is that rewards attract users, but the community retains them.

The figures in this blog show that we're not actually doing that. Yes, people might be attracted by the rewards, but after a first introduction post that might get some nice rewards, following posts often get fewer rewards and even less interaction. Becoming part of the Hive community is a lot of work which a lot of new don't want to spend time on.
But those who are consitent and keep engaging, will prevail!

[katriel1]

But those who are consistent and actively participate will succeed!

I agree with you and I'm trying, it's hard for me but I'm still here

[friendlymoose]

💪🏻

[maxoutspy]

The crypto winter’s retention hit is brutal, just drops to baseline overnight.

[chinito]

GO Spain! 💪😎

[demotruk]

It's mostly Venezuela and Cuba 😅

[hivebuzz]

Congratulations @demotruk! You have completed the following achievement on the Hive blockchain And have been rewarded with New badge(s)

You received more than 80000 upvotes. Your next target is to reach 85000 upvotes.

_{You can view your badges on your board and compare yourself to others in the Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word STOP}

Check out our last posts:

	Our Hive Power Delegations to the April PUM Winners
	Feedback from the May Hive Power Up Day
	Hive Power Up Month Challenge - April 2026 Winners List

[latinowinner]

higher retention rate

[jlinaresp]

!discovery
!PIZZA

[discovery-it]

This post was shared and voted inside the discord by the curators team of discovery-it
Join our Community and follow our Curation Trail
Discovery-it is also a Witness, vote for us here
Delegate to us for passive income. Check our 80% fee-back Program

---

[pizzabot]

PIZZA!

$PIZZA slices delivered:
@jlinaresp_(4/15) tipped @demotruk

_{Send $PIZZA tips in Discord via tip.cc!}