New users need a sense of growth if they are going to stick with Hive. The same principle which is seen in game design very much applies here - users who don't experience a sense of growth with their participation are likely to get bored and leave.
It takes an extraordinary amount of work to get to 1000 HP or higher for an ordinary user without buying in, which is the lower limit to where you begin to see real value in holding HP. Some people see value in Hive inherently and will have that kind of dedication even without getting value initially, but most people need a progressive sense of growth. It doesn't take weeks to get to level 2 in World of Warcraft. The first few levels come quickly, precisely to give new users an immediate sense of growth.
What is the difference between having 5 Hive Power and having 100 Hive Power?
Bigger upvote? No. At the current price, You need several hundred HP before your vote is even $0.01, and you need even more before your vote beats the $0.02 dust threshold on its own.
More curation rewards? Sort of, but any amount of curation rewards at this level is trivial. The difference between earning a fraction of a penny and a slightly larger fraction of a penny per vote is not meaningful to an ordinary user.
More resource credits? Unless you are unusually active for a new user, you're likely to have all the RC's you need once you have 5-10 HP. So while going from 0 HP to 5 HP is very important, RC's don't provide much marginal value after the first 10 HP or so to a normal new user.
Leveling up and Earning Perks
My suggestion is to have a system of discrete levels based on HP. Each new level should take more HP than the last. It doesn't necessarily have to be baked into the network consensus rules, it could be a convention similar to how we deem users with 1MV to be 'minnows', 10MV 'dolphins' etc.
Perks can then be provided by convention as well, or perhaps some could be baked into the network rules to be more meaningful. You could have purely symbolic things like badges or avatar options, or more utilitarian things like access to private message services. These are just broad ideas, the point is that we need to provide something to new users as they grow through the early stages of building HP, to keep them engaged and feeling like they are seeing progress with their Hive account. There shouldn't be a massive gulf before they see value from building their HP.
I wrote a similar blog post to this years ago on Steem, but I still feel like this is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed today. It's a fact that users don't stick around, and I think this could help to fix it.
It’s extremely hard to grow organically and I do fine we lose a lot of people because it. Gamification at lower levels with badges or rewards is a step in the right direction. It also going to take existing users curating new content. I know I find my self voting for the same people and not spreading it to new users. This can be seen with many users who’s accounts are set to automatically vote the same people. There’s nothing wrong with this because your doing this because you like their content, but i think the entire community needs to focus on new users as more adoption helps everyone vs rewarding just a few people.
I agree that the most important thing is to just spread the rewards. But even if the rewards are spread widely, especially if it's bringing in more users in general, we need a combination of the two. It will still take most new users a long time to reach 'minnow' levels, where their votes start to matter a little. So we still need to encourage them along with a sense of benefit from the little amount of HP that they get initially.
Exactly it’s a combination of the two. The other thing that we need to be aware of is content that’s low quality getting high rewards. It’s discouraging to spend hours on a post to see a two sentence post with 1 photo making a pretty significant amount of money. Not only that is new users see this and think that the system is bias to certain people and not on the content.
For sure gamification of the platform would make it far more fun I know there’s a proposal by hivebuzz to do something of the sort
I have seen many new users leave because they are not experience growth on hive.
I was even a victim here before I came back to hive
It's a great idea, I remember it was pretty crap around here from a vote weight perspective until I had 500 HP.
Some new users are frequenting the tribes I think, because it's easier to get a decent stake. LEO is a good example of that.
Some low level 'badges' would be cool. We could have plankton, krill, shrimp before minnow if we want to keep the aquatic theme.
We have to keep seeking out the good 'small fry' and get votes to them. A $10 post can give them a real boost.
RCs seem to be irrelevant as long as you have some HP, but I understand they would play more of a part if there was a lot more traffic and the cost of transactions would go up. Is that right? For now they do not really prevent spam if someone is determined to do it, but it is not too much of an issue generally. Just some silly accounts giving tiny flags to everyone.
Yes, RC's would become more significant if there was more traffic. Not necessarily a good thing - increases barrier to entry. Ideally it should always be easy and low cost to be a normal user. It's only if you actually are consuming large amounts of bandwidth that you should start to be constrained.
We could start seeing other uses of RC's though. I like the way RC's are spent for account creation. There may be other ways to give value to RC's where network costs/limitations are concerned.
I have used a lot of RCs claiming accounts, but not created that many.
It's a really great idea, a very good contribution and initiative to new users. Many times the low perception of HP on new users causes demotivation in them in the short or medium time so they stop publishing posts and leave the platform.
thanks for actually providing a realistic number for voting power! been here 3 or4 weeks now... been searching and asking around, with no straight answer. i just randomly stumbled upon this ! ....amyway thanks again, appreciate the post