Hive Proposal Costs per Active User

themarkymark in #hive-167547 • 5 months ago

In a rather lengthy discussion today someone asked how many active users do we have currently. I took a guess of around 5,000 - 15,000, but said it was really difficult to accurately calculate.

I did however run my report that I use as a rough estimate.

Month	Unique Authors (Top Level Posts)
July 2023	3,187
August 2023	8,767
September 2023	8,080
October 2023	7,827
November 2023	7,898
December 2023	7,802
January 2024	8,130
February 2024	8,153
March 2024	8,623
April 2024	8,382
May 2024	8,245
June 2024	7,835
July 2024	7,065

Based on this, I got an average of 8,067.25 after ignoring July 2023 outlier. While I think this is a fairly accurate assessment, it isn't perfect for two reasons. Most users on Hive have 2-10 accounts. Also, a lot of dapp users like Splinterlands likely don't make posts. Let's pretend these two facts balance each other out and this number is an accurate reflection of our active monthly users.

With that in mind, I took all the proposals paid out in the last 365 days and compared them to the average monthly users. This gives me a rough number of how much each proposal costs per user per year on an ongoing basis. Now this number is also not perfect, as some proposals just started getting funded, and others maybe coming up to ending funding. It is however an accurate comparison of how much funding has been distributed in the last year, and most proposals are renewed yearly for potentially even more money. This is also affected by proposals that were only partially funded.

Proposal	Cost Per User Per Year
Value Plan	$161.09
Peak Open	$28.49
Keychain	$27.14
Dbuzz	$21.84
Leo Finance	$19.46
Ecency	$16.24
Howo	$14.93
VSC	$14.28
Honeycomb	$14.07
SPK Network	$13.97
Hive Watchers	$9.78
Keychain Multi-Sg	$9.35
Actifit	$8.52
HiveSQL	$6.11
Hive Auth	$4.35
HiveBuzz	$4.31
V4 App	$2.33
Martibis Projects	$1.98
Hive Dev Portal	$1.97
Urgent Call for Baby Bee's Health	$1.36
Deathwing Nodes	$1.17
HafSQL	$0.78
Recovery of the families of Rio Grande do Sul	$.0.62
Splinterlands	$0.52
The re-birth of Pinmapple	$0.42
BroFund	$0.37
VIMM	$0.14

This is a purely analytical observation of the data taking the total funds distributed by the DHF and dividing by the average monthly active users. This gives us a rough yearly cost per active user to maintain each proposal funded in the last year.

Keep in mind, we are only estimating the average active monthly users based on unique user accounts creating a top level post each month. It also only calculates DHF funds distributed, not how much was asked for. Some proposals just started or were only funded briefly, and will affect where they fall in this chart.

#leofinance #vyb #hive-engine #pob #cent #neoxian #palnet #hive

5 months ago in #hive-167547 by themarkymark

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gerber 5 months ago

how much per user for beeswap 25k$ per year (never funded) but theoretically?

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themarkymark 5 months ago

divide by estimated 8,067.25 monthly users or roughly $3.10/yr.

bozz 5 months ago

You have way too much time on your hands! :) Just kidding. This is some interesting info and it should really open some eyes, but unfortunately, most people will probably just keep doing what they always do.

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vikisecrets 5 months ago

That's a total of $385 per user. Problem is most of the proposals don't provide that much value. Where are the ten thousand new users the leo finance proposal promised?

themarkymark 5 months ago

They still trying to read the @leoglossary posts.

bitcoinflood 5 months ago

At this rate I feel like they are going to have to pay back the DHF which was part of the proposal.

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gerber 5 months ago

Is value plan complete bs ? I've seen it's often voted instantly with 3 votes, right after it's created...

Is there anything positive for HIVE they actually did ?

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gerber 5 months ago

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themarkymark 5 months ago

If you like Race Cars, we spent like $700K so we can have our own.

sanjeevm 5 months ago

So the Value Plan team is in charge of majority of the events it seems.

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themarkymark 5 months ago

I believe so, but everyone is free to do their own thing too.

mypathtofire 5 months ago

I guess this is inherent in all PoS chains that the insiders enrich themselves at the expense of others until all the value will be gone.

ssjsasha 5 months ago

I wonder if you take a graph of active monthly users and compare it to the price graph of the same timeframe if there would be anything notable in comparison

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themarkymark 5 months ago

There is very little fluctuation in monthly active users compared to the price.

urun 5 months ago

is not like people would not come, people dont stay is the problem :D

Pretty expensive.

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kgakakillerg 5 months ago

Why are you down voting me?

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themarkymark 5 months ago

Just curating.

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kgakakillerg 5 months ago

Are you sure you want to do this?

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themarkymark 5 months ago

I think so.

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kgakakillerg 5 months ago

Ok then

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bitcoinflood 5 months ago

I mean that pretty much tells me why it's bonkers why we are not supporting Splinterlands the biggest app on hive. Now yes I do agree that Splinterlands needs to buck up and get their shit in order once this funding goes through but it's clearly a much better use of money over tons of other options that are getting paid right now. LeoFinance you could write off I have a feeling as much as I hate to say it but they are not going to hit user goals and are going to have to pay back the DHF like their promise if they missed the goals. I hope it doesn't come to that but it's not looking the greatest so far.

cwow2 5 months ago

Its not funded because of insane misuse of funds from past fundraisings & users investments.

lordbutterfly 5 months ago

I dont think this was properly titled. This kind of suggests that Splinterlands costs us least per user. top4 at least. which is what you, seems to have concluded looking at this. Instead this just means that Splinterlands got less money than other proposals.

You cant really draw any conclusion from this. Its just a way to show who got most money from the DHF and that is then divided by total user count.

bitcoinflood 5 months ago

true, but one could also say this shows a little light on overall costs for every DHF for the current active user base (granted if it's accurate) seems kind of crazy that you wouldn't be able to pull very accurate numbers off a blockchain something a little off about that lol.

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themarkymark 5 months ago

If Splinterlands was fully funded, it will fall in at $61.98/user/year

bitcoinflood 5 months ago

Ah makes more sense. Is there no way to pull accounts created and active? In a decentralized blockchain you would think those would be things on record? Of course I don't know enough about the core blockchain itself.

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themarkymark 5 months ago

Not really, we have over 2M accounts but ~8,000 actively posting. You could use posts, comments, votes, custom json, there are lots of things you can do, but it isn't an exact science. Top level posts is a good metric, but for example people like Smooth and Freedom don't post, Blocktrades and GTG rarely post but are very active.

Front ends can't really tell who is logged in as it is broadcasts.

In most ecosystems, those who participate are like 10% of the total users the rest are lurkers, but in our case I think that doesn't really hold true due to the rewards. There are certainly lurkers though, but it just can't be quantified. I think "votes" is less reliable as that is more likely going to be 2+ per real user and many voters are completely gone.

I think it is safe to say it is somewhere around 5,000-15,000, but no one really knows.

valued-customer 5 months ago

I think "votes" is less reliable

Autovotes makes it unreliable, as well.

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starkerz 5 months ago

Not sure where u got the idea that 3Speak was funded by the DAO. You should probably delete that line since it’s not true. 3Speak has never been funded by the DAO and is run and funded by Dan and me out of our own pockets, and has been for 5 years now.

I like what ur trying to do here, but please do make it accurate otherwise people might start to think ur just making shit up

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themarkymark 5 months ago

What is the SPK proposal, I'll update it. I thought that was 3Speak related.

PS: I updated it to SPK Network as per the proposal. I was generalizing the project it was tied with as all you get is a username from the proposals pay.

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starkerz 5 months ago

We gave everyone equal opportunity to own SPK, and even vastly throttled inflation so early adopters Don’t get much of an advantage. SPK did not cost the users anything. They all own SPK (except for the people who dumped their tokens of course…). There is a sustainable business model there where cash flows in for storage. I know it works since we will be paying in to get 3Speak storage done there in a decentralized way as soon as the project goes live. It’s in final phase of testnet atm.

So I’d argue there is a way to do proposals and a way not to. I don’t think it is fair to say SPK network cost community members anything when it is open source and is community owned and run.

Its value is far far beyond what hive community paid for it. It does decentralized, incentivized cloud storage for stuff u can’t store on chain and decentralized incentivized file transfer (amongst other things). Total budget was 750k usd over 3 years. That is insanely cheap compared to certain things being paid for that return zero ownership and most of which aren’t even open source.

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stayoutoftherz 5 months ago

Good to know, from looking at the price of LARYX I thought the project was dead like many others.

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starkerz 5 months ago

Far from, it is about to go into live net soon

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themarkymark 5 months ago

I originally thought of @lordbutterfly's comment about Vibes acquisition cost per user. I thought of Hive Watchers and how much it costs per each user per year in perspective. It isn't really a "cost per user" as in users are paying it out of their pocket, at least not directly. It's more of a flip on the "acquisition cost" metric typically used for marketing. I then thought it would be interesting to compare every proposal against the active users.

It's just another way of looking at the costs involved for the proposals compared to an estimated monthly active users.

I purposely shared no opinion on the proposals themselves, I left that up to everyone to do on their own.

sircork 5 months ago

Just to clarify my understanding. In the first table, when you say "unique posts" but generalize within the article as "unique users", is it safe to assume that what you did was find the unique posting names and attribute a count of 1 each if they made at least one or more posts in the month?

What I mean is, if you and I were the only two human users, but we made 40 unique posts combined all month long, then you waded through the blocks, found all the posts made in the month total, and then only counted the two actually unique names on them to make these numbers?

So 7,065 is not "unique posts" but rather, "unique posters"? Correct?

Just making sure I understand correctly.

Because coming back after my long sabbatical, I can definitely feel the pulse is much slower than it was when we had double or triple these numbers on the daily a few years ago. And these estimates feel about right based on the amount of fresh content I see as I dig around getting back into things, and the reduced traffic in all the associated discords I visit, once bustling little cities, many, while still alive and in use, seem far more subdued than "once upon a time".

So I was certainly wondering myself, what these numbers looked like, and if some of the ideas I have for upcoming projects have an audience here big enough to even sustain them, make them worthwhile or warrant the effort, time and costs making them would take.

Not that a "small" ecosystem would preclude me from making things, but some of the things I have in mind to create, would not on their own, particularly be an attraction to incentivize brand new people to come and make brand new accounts for themselves, but rather, would mostly extend some new capabilities for users already on the platform.

And having a good estimate of the population like you are striving for here, right on time to match my own musings about such things, would temper my expectations of the speed of my idea's adoption and growth and utility to the community that has chosen to stick around here so far.

Thanks for doing this either way. I'm just mostly wanting to make sure what I'm seeing is unique users and not unique posts as labelled, since those would be some severely disappointing numbers if its actually unique posts.

Thanks Marky.

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themarkymark 5 months ago

I took all the author user names that made a top level post (not a comment) in a month and then did a unique so each username was counted once.

I have no way of knowing if someone used three different accounts to make three different posts, and I know there are many who do this. But at the same time, I also know many users of Splinterlands don't post and only play the game, so without knowing how much of each, I just hope they balance out to be roughly the same. Either way, it's just an estimate based on the best viable metric.

sircork 5 months ago

Yup, got it, unique-ing the array is the way.

Based on "feel" and years of experience here watching, I think I would have flat out guessed numbers only slightly lower than yours, I was just telling somebody my guess was about 3K logging in a day, when it used to ~feel~ more like 30K in the heyday.

And I didn't take into account the gamers. I don't think about them much. From my perspective I suppose they are using wallets and making blocks with their play and transactions so they keep the chain and currency alive to a degree, but somehow that feels separate from what makes this place the special place that it is for all the other dApps and interfaces and communities. Sort of like they don't even really have to know we exist to just play the game, and in turn don't do much participating in governance or proposal selection or things like that. Pros and cons to that. Not the point of my query. Just an aside.

Again, thanks for the data. Right on time for me, my dude.

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themarkymark 5 months ago

And I didn't take into account the gamers.

I know Splinterlands has a lot of users that only play Splinterlands. I could probably do some fancy tests on unique custom json operations without top level posts to even further refine it. I did check custom jsons and the numbers are off the charts. 27K for posting auth, and 119K for active auth in just the last 30 days. There are so many bots it's just throwing a dart at that point.

sircork 5 months ago

I responded on bitcoinfloods comment, your follower count broke my tool, you big celebrity you. Now I gotta fix that and add pagination to my results screen. :D Thanks for that QA test on 14K followers. :P

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themarkymark 5 months ago

I am not under any illusions I have 13K+ followers.

sircork 5 months ago

Haha, well, since you break my tool with your ... large payload. (gross)

I can tell you that subjective and anecdotal experiments show about a 10% "true" average, with a wildly wide "more or less" attached to that of course.

So its likely you do have at least 1300 or more. If that is any consolation :)

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crypticat 5 months ago

The word Value should be taken out of the Value Plan as there is nothing of value in it. Unfortunately a few large whales support this inflation scam and misappropriation of funds. I've tried talking to them, there's no point.

They have no idea how many people are not investing a cent in HIVE because of this waste. I sold most and abandoned all those sock accounts when it was around 0.0015 ETH because the chain refused to adopt a burn proposal of mine and now its 0.00006 ETH. Thats a 25x drop, it hasn't done well versus the USD either. I predicted this (well not this bad) and of course not enough people were smart enough to understand except a few million votes which was not enough. What do I know though, I just do this sort of stuff for a living and understand that inflation along with thoughtless spending destroy value.

Inflation needs to be tied to actual user growth and your numbers show a drop in users which means HIVE is just going to go down in value. Everytime I think about investing a few ETH in this chain, I look at the proposals and think absolutely not.

Enjoy those wasteful duplicate projects and especially that Rally car.

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nonameslefttouse 5 months ago

Costs come down with more active users, yet costs remain the same regardless. Good to know. ;)

valued-customer 5 months ago

I appreciate you putting this together. Totaling the whole list together, it's $385.59. I bet there's a lot of users that haven't received that much through their accounts in a year. I imagine they'd spend that on other things if they could. I don't think we should be spending their stake in the DHF for them.

However, folks that don't have much stake aren't the ones parting with the DHF. Folks with substantial stake are parting with most of that money, because they have most of the stake on the platform. You have a fair chunk, and your portion of the DHF spend is a lot more than mine, for example.

Thanks!

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gerber 5 months ago

simplest airdrop of these money to users would bring more users, instead few people just waste these money on themselves or theirs failing applications

valued-customer 5 months ago

Insofar as majority rule voting forcibly takes stake from those that do not support proposals in the DHF, by calculating the proportional share in the DHF Hive users have and only disbursing funds from the share of the users that vote for proposals when they surmount the return proposal that forced taking of DHF funds can be prevented.

I don't support air dropping the Founder's Stake to Hive users because that would cause them to quickly spend it, in turn creating inflation which would disrupt HBD price stability, that in turn would cause the HBD Stabilization Fund to have to expend funds to stabilize the price of HBD. Also, the DHF is a resource that can be used to fund useful development and some proposals are much more than simple money grabs.

By segregating individual Hive user's share in the DHF, those more prudent would conserve the DHF for such useful and beneficial proposals, while the profligate who spend the DHF away with their careless voting for funding rally cars will quickly lose their ability to so waste the DHF and line the pockets of their friends. Majority rule isn't fair, because 51% of voters can just take the asset of the 49% minority for whatever they want, which is just theft of their assets by a bigger gang.

Majority rule democracy is just tyranny of the majority, and is often abused by clever deceivers for their financial gain. Preventing the share of prudent Hive users of the DHF from being subject to such theft would enable those users to spend their share of the DHF on substantive proposals, while presently their share is unprotected from the avarice of the duplicitous and profligacy of their minions.

godfish 5 months ago

I am quite sure that Worldmappin will be able to actually contribute to the community more than it currestly costs, and to run without DHF funding eventually. That's what all projects should aim on anyways.

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bitcoinflood 5 months ago

100% This is the correct mindset IMO

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steevc 5 months ago

Most of these are costing us pennies per day or less. That does not seem too bad, but some people will make less in a year than the 'value plan'. This is yet another problem that would be eased by more active users. I have seen the numbers decrease through some of the queries I run (using HiveSQL of course).

I can see value in proposals for new projects to get started, but the bigger ones ought to be able to fund themselves. Splinterlands has had a lot of fiat and crypto pumped into it by players. Others take a cut of post rewards and that seems fair as they provide a service that people want. They may just not make enough to pay a team with the lack of users.

We are relying on various people who fund their own projects too. Some have never put in a proposal.

We need projects that will bring in more users as well as keeping existing ones active. We get some choice in which get funded and that is good. Of course the whales have the main say in this.

bitcoinflood 5 months ago

I think we have to look back at what gave us the spike in users on month Aug 2023. What happened then for the big massive spike of which most of those users did end up sticking around?

steevc 5 months ago

Was that due to Splinterlands? I suspect a lot of game accounts never got into the social side. If people get into various aspects of the platform then they may be more likely to stick around. Many don't realise how diverse it is.

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gadrian 5 months ago

2023 is way after Splinterlands' boom period.

Seems like Inleo and OCDB dominated onboarding in August 2023 (after looking at @arcannge's stats from back then). Maybe it matters that it was pre-Hivefest period, and things got "busy" with various announcements and people getting excited.

steevc 5 months ago

I lose track of when things happened. I will have been on here for 8 years tomorrow! I've stuck with it the whole time as it's fun.

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gadrian 5 months ago

Oh boy! 8 years? 2016? You were so early? Congrats for sticking around! It's fun, but sometimes it's challenging when there's a lot of negativity.

steevc 5 months ago

It's all about the people you engage with. Don't seek out the negativity.

jacobtothe 5 months ago

Meanwhile, I'd like to see someone create a bot to analyze every new post for a basic plagiarism check and flag possible violations for human review. Seems more valuable than some projects here.

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