I am very sorry about that...I just searched for you in Discord and saw that you did indeed message me about that. I guess I must have missed it. I turn off Discord notifications when I'm working and sometimes I come back to a deluge of messages and things can fall through the cracks. Please don't hesitate to ping me again in the future if I don't respond to something, or you can also message me on the Mattermost Hive chat. I get a lot fewer messages there.
Can you clarify what you meant when you said that you would hire someone from within the Splinterlands team?
Sorry - I worded this poorly. What I mean is that I want to hire someone new, who would then become part of the Splinterlands team. I think someone who is directly part of the team as their full time job will be much more motivated and get better results than someone at an agency who is just assigned to the project.
I have tried to on-board numerous people to Hive, even people with crypto experience - I even wrote them guides.. None of them are users today. I see that part of this is caused by the complete failure of all Hive sites to provide education about the blockchain and UI systems - leaving users confused and de-motivated. At some point I will solve this myself if no-one else does.
I have had similar experiences, which is why I don't think direct onboarding to Hive is the way to go. Even if better education options were available, my guess is that most people won't be motivated enough to spend the time to consume the education materials.
Instead, I think Hive should aim to have lots of great apps, and users will onboard to an app that interests them and then will naturally over time start learning about Hive and exploring more of the ecosystem just as a result of them using an app that is on the platform.
There are definitely a good number of people that discovered Hive and went on to participate in the ecosystem just because they played Splinterlands (I know this anecdotally, but it would be neat if someone could do some kind of analysis to determine how many accounts that started with Splinterlands went on to participate more generally on Hive). If those same people were onboarded to Hive directly, my guess is they would probably not be interested, but because they were exposed to it through something they are more naturally interested in it was a smoother experience.
I think this is the case for pretty much all blockchains. I personally don't just go and use other blockchains, but I will use them if there's an app I want to try out that is built there. To me, that is why Hive is falling so far behind. There are either not enough apps that people want to use, or people just don't know about the apps that are here because we don't promote them like other platforms can. This is what this proposal is all about and what I think Splinterlands is in the best position to provide right now - getting the word out to the broader web3 community about a fun and engaging game on Hive as a way to successfully onboard lots of new users to the ecosystem.
Ok, understood - I realised through that proposal process that the proposal system desperately needs better communications and notifications built in - the PeakD team took up my suggestion of adding in notifications for new proposals, but I'm not sure how much that has helped.
Ok, thanks for clarifying.
I am thinking more of the type of education info that is built-in to the UI as is found in triple A games, so they can't be totally avoided, but are non invasive, intelligent/dynamic and are also potentially gamified or at least truly useful!
Most of the people I invite are creative people and/or smart - they love the idea of hive but are repelled by it's details unfortunately - anything that can be done to increase retention, should really be done - as otherwise traffic driven by any marketing efforts are like pouring water into a sieve. I know from my own social network that it there is a desire to get users as fast as possible, but if that skips over the on-site optimisation needed to retain them, then it's counter productive.
As far as your proposal goes, I am for it. I just want to make sure that there is something in it for the rest of Hive too. I know you have highlighted some ideas already in that direction. Perhaps the most obvious opportunity in that direction I can think of is to nudge Splinterlands users to become Hive bloggers and to get them using generic Hive social networks to do that, rather than directing them to Splintertalk - do you think that's possible?
I will vote on this now. :)