In recent days much has been written about the Decentralized Hive Fund (DHF). In what is undoubtedly a harsh assessment, I would have to categorize many of those recent posts I read as “emotional bile” albeit often well-meant. Sadly enough, it seems it is an attitude which over the last years has taken root and tends to guarantee prime spotlight attention. Amplified by the megaphones known as “social media” and “free speech”.
Hang on, don’t leave yet because I was a little harsh. Hear me out!
Nevertheless, I tend to read all of it which comes my way as I find it important to understand where people come from and how we could possibly change things before gathering a reputation of being a “hostile community”. Because, as mentioned before, almost all of it is well-meant and also meant to “toughen up” the thinking of our community. I understand the root of many of those posts.
One of the more neutral and interesting posts I read was @azircon’s recent DHF post in which they argue the importance of the return fund and that we should further raise the return proposal.
I disagree.
Looking at the active proposals at the moment of writing this post, only 6 proposals are currently being funded. Which means that the popular OpenSeed proposal, backed by a team with both knowledge and staying power, isn’t funded. The popular Hive interface Peakd proposal isn’t funded anymore either. Even the almost ended Keychain development proposal isn’t funded anymore.
Despite an available budget of close to 5,000HBD/day, right now less than 20% of the available funding is being used because the return proposal has set the threshold for proposal approval (funding) at more than 23 million HP.
The DHF Should Actively Fund and Support Projects
While the Return Proposal is an important tool, we shouldn’t weaponize it and raise the barrier to entry too high.
The DHF is an (almost) unique asset to our keychain and can be a powerful weapon to attract quality projects and also (core) developers. It is important that devs and project founders know that they can actually successfully raise support, and funds, using the tool without needing to invest months into campaigning within the chain’s ecosystem in order to reach the threshold and get funded.
A perfect example here is the @dapplr proposal for the creation of a new mobile app for Hive, a mobile app focused on user experience. The team launched their proposal two weeks ago, asking for 30HBD/day until September 2020.
The proposal is still not funded, and around 10 million HP short of being funded. That’s one @freedom or two @blocktrades or one hundred (!) @tarzkp still lacking to fund the proposal. To fund 30 whopping HBD/day. Less than 1% of the daily DHF budget.
Basically, this means that the community does NOT care about a better mobile experience and would rather save those 30HBD and continue with the available options.
Or maybe, maybe the community has actually expressed its desire to see this proposal happen but the threshold to funding is too high?
Do we think that sets a great example to attract more devs and new projects which wish to make use of our DHF, our secret dark horse weapon, or does it mean we are “failing” somewhere?
Rethinking the Return Proposal and DHF Support
In an ideal world, I would prefer the Return Proposal to be much lower - somewhere around 13-15 million HP - and the community to be more dynamic in supporting smaller budget projects.
Even if the team behind the proposal may still be unproven within our ecosystem. Especially if the team behind the proposal is still unproven within our ecosystem.
While it is rather easy to support projects by top witnesses or community leaders, even if of much higher funding value, if the Return Proposal is backed too heavily we risk excluding ourselves from attracting new devs and projects because they simply can’t get the support required for their proposal to be funded.
When “protective territorialism” becomes a story of shooting oneself in the foot.
The Kickstart Effect
When new projects join the chain and introduce their project, their introduction and a possible first low value proposal will serve them as “validation”. A signal our community sends them that not only do we welcome their idea but also want to see it happen, happen on our chain.
This is an important psychological message we send the team. A first degree of success for them, which will make them appreciate our chain, and its mechanics, even more.
By funding a proposal such as the dapplr proposal, we don’t hurt ourselves spending 30HBD/day. Besides, we can always unvote the proposal again if after some weeks the team has gone MIA.
But more important than the risk of losing potentially 1,800HBD before unvoting the proposal en masse, is the good vibes and future word of mouth the funding may generate.
No project built on any platform is guaranteed to succeed. With a daily DHF budget of close to 5,000HBD/day currently, we are not going to fund many 6-digit wages. Neither can it support projects with aggressive user acquisition.
Taking a “punt” on a new project has many more positive elements than setting our default threshold for funding too high.
Imagine the project succeeds and delivers an initial release, followed by a second proposal. The second proposal being of a much more significant value and allowing the project’s team to focus a set amount of hours every day on building the best possible product, dapp they can. Because their initial release earned them their “medals on our battlefield”, and much community love as well as appreciation of the biggest whales, the second proposal gets funded easily and swiftly.
Queue Hive’s PR machine, as well as the team writing on their own social channels off-chain, and suddenly we have a successful DHF story being covered on all crypto news outlets.
Of course, such success story will attract our chain many more eyeballs, devs, and also users. Because on Hive the community makes the difference and supports positivity.
On Hive there’s success stories.
Let’s not weaponize the return proposal too heavily and let’s make sure that new projects, proposals can focus mostly on building rather than needing to campaign for months.
As a community we should be able to easily support and fund projects like the dapplr proposal within days only, generating a success vibe on Hive.
Let’s start using the DHF to actually support efforts and turn it in a general success stories. Even if there will be failures... we’re all here for the wins. Wins created by community support.
Apologies for possible typos and possibly few missing words here and there as my eye sight is still heavily impaired and I’m still coming to grips with using my devices in this “new normal” for me.
I think, even lower. Is that a legacy we brought and should be changed ?
I don’t think funding should be easy. A return proposal with too low backing opens a whole new can of worms. In a caring, and proud, community 13-15m HP should be achievable rather easily for the best presented projects.
That's why I don't like DHF much, the idea of funding projects isn't bad, but how it works rn is concerning. As a heavy mobile user, @dapplr should be the first to get funded, then everyone has different opinions, stakes I have can't change much on the voting, then the only way is to buy hive to become a whale i guess...
Funding shouldn't be easy but sometimes in social media we love our pitchforks too much. We have to make sure we don't turn them against ourselves.
good advice
30 HBD per day is no-brainer. unbelievable that this is still not funded.
smh
We need definitely an App. Why the community don’t care I don’t understand!?
Well said. DHF is one of our best assets. Dash was able to spend millions on marketing alone and they have a large development team 100% paid by their DAO. We need to do as much as possible before VOICE goes public. One could make the argument for keeping more funds saved up for a later day. But I would say that it is too much of a risk. We must not be late to the party. We must do everything we cam do be at point where we are comparable to traditional social media experiences. After that we can talk about being conservative with DHF.
We are already a latecomer at the party. That's an undeniable fact. Other chains are throwing funds at dapp acquisition, we are still waiting for in 2017 announced SMTs.
IMHO there is another option in the room than lowering the "Return proposal":
What if a committee of trusted witnesses will setup a "kickstarter" proposal in order to gather funds on a "hive-kickstarter" account.
Smaller projects may apply for smaller fundings like @dapplr and negotiate goals and milestones for the project which will benefit HIVE. The committee would then be able to fund those projects in a short time frame, the project can deliver milestone achievements and get's funded more easily than waiting weeks or month passing the "Return proposal".
Just throwing in this idea for further discussion.
In a real life environment I would favor such setup. It is also how most funds operate.
On a pseudonimity social media platform I would not want to add too much of a human front to things. No amount of HIVE could possibly compensate those witnesses for the amount of vitriol they may face when rejecting a project.
Haven't you read that below article:
https://peakd.com/hive-177682/@neoxian/dear-hive-we-need-to-start-being-more-critical-about-proposals#@r1s2g3/re-neoxian-q9t3ub
They are just waiting for their friend to quote it for 300 HBD per day,so that they can fund it.
Agreed on mostly everything. Really valuable projects are not being supported and that kinda irritates me.
I remember when dao was introduced, the whole community talked about being excited to support different projects, while in the reality most of them are inert as fuck.
Agreed. I'm not voting the return proposal
To me there is just to much politics - again!!
Totally agree on success stories being important.
I'd like dapplr and roomservice's Brave advertising to be funded and feel there is enough in the bank to throw a little caution into the wind.
A majority of online successes were created by people who hadn't yet proven themselves to their investors. Many of those founders became later investors in startups themselves. A failure rate should be an integral part of the DHF culture (for cheaper projects). Angel investors often deal with an average of only 1/16 successful funding.
I think dapplr’s proposal should have been activated within 3 days. As for the Brave advertising proposal, I found the pitch itself rather weak but that may be influenced by my background with startups. In my former position, I would have found reading that pitch a waste of my time and would never have been allocated a budget. Pitching is an art and the pitch matters.
Yeah, it seems that this is being missed, and it's strange because the funds aren't directly out of someone's pockets - just a little from everyone's I guess.
I'd be interested to know how the Brave proposal pitch could be improved, although I feel that at present the best proposal ever wouldn't be funded. We do need to decide on key aspects: The advert text, the destination of the link, and probably have people waiting on the other end to assist.
5/6k $ though, seems worth a shot to me, and if it's a failure we have things to learn from.
!ENGAGE 15
My objection isn’t necessarily to the project, but rather the content of the proposal itself.
First of all, rather than the community decisions, I would expect A/B testing. The mere suggestion of that also hints that someone knows what they’re talking about.
Of course, an important part is the landing page. Of course this should be a converting page. Again added credibility for the pitcher.
Generally, while I understand the psychology behind it, the whole “let the community decide” makes the project more of a “testing the waters here” pitch than a resolute “this is what we should do”. And we will let the data decide, after having validated the copy we use with some specialists. Also much faster a process and easier to make tweaks during the campaign than when the copy and landing page has been decided by the community.
Would also have loved to read some estimates re-expected cost/click and potentially, if available, reference to already existing campaigns (everyone who uses Brave is crypto aware is too weak an assumption for me, but hearing about different crypto projects already using Brave Ads will gather my interest). Your pitch, convince me this is worth “my money” without making me do additional homework.
I’m not saying it would have resulted in the proposal being activated, but there definitely was rooom to make the pitch stronger, more enticing.
Side note: startups who go in an accelerator do get trained in the art of pitching. The pitch, like the presentation of your meal in a restaurant, is half the work done. Any emailed pitch deck should capture the whole teaser, as well as the selling points, on max. 7 slides. No need for more than 3-4 intro sentences in the email. That limited consolidated information will be sufficient to tempt the VC, and decide to make time for the people (15-30 minutes only, which may result in moving on to do due diligence).
Fair points and some useful info.
To be honest, I think the first run with adverts (Brave or not) should be viewed as mostly testing the waters. I wouldn't expect a huge success first time around and as long as what went well/not so well was being recorded, hopefully there would be an improvement next time around.
I'm not sure if Brave ads are being tailored to me but I am seeing a lot of 'earn by staking' and considering Brave users are being paid to consume, this feels like a good place to start.
All is not lost. Since the Brave proposal @roomservice has scored at least one homerun. I would definitely launch the proposal again, in tweaked version.
Add cost for A/B testing integration, maybe also for an illustrator. Some mock ads would definitely not hurt the proposal, and I would even go as far as already get a one-pager template from Themeforest and make a mock landing page, with hiveonboarding integrated.
You would be amazed how much the success of a 6 months ads campaign can be tweaked. I’m not sure if Brave Ads offers the option to rotate multiple ads, but continuous A/B testing and tweaking copy can do wonders. After having looked slightly more in to Brave Ads since our last convo about it, I think it’s definitely worth a punt.
But keep in mind that 200HBD/day is fairly competitive compared to average demand of other proposals. It’s definitely not low, even if $6k total cost isn’t a lot (probably closer to 7-7.5k). People may expect more a “damn, this is a great opportunity” proposal rather than a “why not” feel. Also elaborate a little on how conversion will be tracked and how frequently updates will be provided.
This will now probably be helped by @roomservice’s growing track record. But that doesn’t change that we have a structural/cultural issue with the threshold for proposal approval.
!ENGAGE 30
ENGAGEtokens.!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.ENGAGEtokens.