Hey everyone!
As some of you might know, OCD has been running the community incubation program for a while now and it's been growing steadily - currently around 40 communities incubated. Here's a quick "what it is and what do we do" for anyone not aware.
We find or let niche communities apply to our incubation through our Discord. We delegate them HP based on their subscriber count to encourage growth. We let them nominate posts they want to reward more in their community and vote them up after. We encourage them to write curation reports that they share the rewards of with other curators or moderators in their community.
We listen to feedback on how to improve the process. : )
One idea we had recently was for instance the curation reports to set aside a percentage towards the post reward liquidating account @reward.app so that we'd know that those who do this are using that percentage to tip comments and posts that are decent but maybe not great enough for nomination of our votes. Some communities have participated in this and enjoyed it the results whereas others haven't attempted it or had any interest, it's not been mandatory just something we thought would improve the community experience for users participating in it. These posts would receive a bigger vote than usual with part of it being used towards tipping which is something the @peakd front-end makes so easy for both posts and comments so we were hoping more use would come to it to highlight the feeless transactions our blockchain can offer on top of the monetization through stakebased curation.
Some issues we've been facing lately, but not much of, has been certain community leaders not being that interested in growing their community. They've been invited to our incubation and given most of the tools to let us help their community grow, which after a short time is not that complicated of a process which I'm sure the other incubated community participants can back me up on. After some time the interest was just gone from some leaders and it made it a bit difficult for us to know how to move forward.
For example having curators and moderators from other communities or from the OCD team pick up the curation for them and grow their community without knowing how that leader may act in the near future - they are the owner of the community account so they could easily go 180 at some point and start muting accounts at random or make their community unusable in other ways by changing the rules, etc. Instead we figured that a community such as that niche is still something we'd want to support and see grow so the solution there was to either create our own or support one of the other communities that are similar to it that exist. We (OCD) are in no way attempting to centralize community management and even when we have created new communities we've let curators create the accounts themselves with the trust they've built through us hoping that the amount of support and attention we'd provide to it won't go to waste in the near future.
A few new communities came to life recently after we proposed this change as to abandon some that seemed uninterested to want to be active in the ones they've created and were incubated for (some of this inactivity is common and I'm not trying to blame the leaders for it, real life exists and Hive is not the main priority for everyone :P) but it's been nice to see how quickly they sprung to life and we're looking forward to kickstart more new communities but also old ones that aren't as active in the near future with contests, focused curation for a certain amount of time, etc. One of these new communities, started by @roadstories called Hive Pets already has 221 subsribers and 150 active users after only a couple weeks of existing! I honestly can't believe a community focused on pets of our users didn't exist yet so I'm sure there's a lot more yet to spring to life that we're looking forward to assisting in getting their limelight and growth.
On an ending note, I also want to mention that as the name says "incubation" there will also be a time where certain communities will have become too big and too active to be in our roster any longer, it'll be like having kids and watch them go to college and we're just going to have to let them go even if they secretly want to continue staying home. :P
I'd also like to recommend content creators reading this to check out on which those communities are that we are incubating, I'm sure there's something you can find that suits you and you can call home once you get used to posting and interacting with users there. I'm really excited to see how well it's progressing and can't wait to see what an influx of new users will do to these communities - along with hopefully some incentive fixes on how curation and certain rules around it work in a future hardfork!
Now that you have a general idea of what the incubation does if you weren't aware of it before, we'd love to hear if you have any more ideas on how we could improve on it aside from what I already mentioned. We'll consider anything that's reasonable and in our power to change. Thanks for reading and keep making communities awesome!
PS! We've generally refrained from adding communities that also have a tribe behind them as we wouldn't want to indirectly affect token prices or users investing in it's future based on our involvement as we may at any time discontinue the incubation of certain tribes if there's something we don't think is bringing value to the ecosystem of Hive. There have been some exceptions, though, where we've thought the niche was too big to not support and the activity behind it was there but we hope people do their due diligence if they decide to invest into these tokens as we haven't done any research on the tokenomics of said tribes nor does our incubation endorse them in that way. Having said that we have a stricter application process for those who have a token behind them and we generally talk it out with them properly before adding them to our incubation.
