Some thoughts

[JoelR]

1. The premise of Community Hive confuses me.  You visit CH, only to be redirected away at the first mildly interesting link you find.  

What's your reason for coming back and finding more interesting links? If that site did it's job, it would try to keep you.  

2. Once you set your first community to follow, youre highly disincentivized to follow other communities through the site's design.  

When you login, you are taken immediately to the Follow  feed.  Ideally, you find an interesting link and redirected off site. So you never look at the Discover feed.  

One of the things that Facebook got very, very right is that they understood every user needs to follow a "critical mass" of users, pages, or groups to push enough interesting content.  Facebook only surfaces 15% of content, which means they need you to follow lots of people who post a mix of boring and interesting content, so they can filter out the boring and only show you interesting.  That's why they're so aggressive about pushing you to follow friends and pages and groups until you hit a critical mass.  On the Hive, you're not pushed to follow more communities.  

My point is that if you're following less than X communities (where X is a critical mass number that you algorithmically compute,), your Follower feed should look a lot like the Discover feed to encourage users to add more communities until they hit X threshold. 

3. This is me being mildly facetious, but for community owners, you should make their sites overweight appear in Discover and Follow for themselves.  Site owners are going to want to see their sites more often.  Even if their sites are boring and don't show to anyone else.  

4. This is me being very facetious, but this might be the only major feature for Xenforo all year.  Brought to you by IPS.  

[Charles]

We are going to make it clearer to people that Community Hive works best when you follow multiple communities. You will also start to see suggestions from Discover in your Following feed. The new Hide options lets you curate this. You are right that if you only follow one community then Community Hive is not very useful. But when you follow more than one it really shines.

If the community you click in "keeps" you then that's great for everyone. The community owner gets a new member, the member finds a community they enjoy, and Community Hive was the service they both appreciate for bringing them together. We are here to help community managers and members come together. Yes, that's the opposite of a social media network but owned communities are the opposite of social media too so we think we are in the right place.

So yes, you are right, and you will see improvements to that this week and next.

Xenforo is certainly a static, aging platform and we are happy to bring a bit of modern thinking to their ecosystem.

 

I can see how some may not "get" what Community Hive is about because they are comparing us to social media. With social media, they are trying to own both your content and those reading your content. Instead, I would think of Community Hive more like a search engine. We are here to connect you to great content but are not claiming any ownership of that content or the people engaging with it.

 

Mini Roadmap Coming Soon:

• Search - A central place to search content in communities. Visitors can find communities talking about a specific subject.
   
• Sign in with Community Hive - Make it even easier to capture new visitors with privacy-first single-sign-on for your community. Visitors coming to you via Community Hive are already known and vetted so can join with a single click.
   
• Community Profiles - Publish a short bio of your community along with a mini-feed of your most popular content. Indexable by Google and friends. 
   
• Backend stuff - Boring, but important, changes on the backend to improve our sorting algorithms, design, user experience, and community management.
   
• More Integrations - Extend our reach to more community platforms.

 

Several have asked, and below is a preview of our paid plans for community managers. Our thoughts here are to make Community Hive free and useful for community managers but offer plans for those who want more services from us.

We are not ready to announce pricing but hope to make the paid plans very affordable. In fact, we're trying to target less than $2/month for Advanced.

We will be launching the paid plans soon but they will all be free during this initial phase. So be sure to sign up to try them out since they will not cost you anything until, I would guess, well into 2024.

[JoelR]

50 minutes ago, Charles said:

We are going to make it clearer to people that Community Hive works best when you follow multiple communities. You will also start to see suggestions from Discover in your Following feed. The new Hide options lets you curate this. You are right that if you only follow one community then Community Hive is not very useful. But when you follow more than one it really shines.

A more advanced suggestion is to add a block every X posts that encourages you to follow similar communities or interesting communities.  

This is a feature that I always thought Invision Community should offer anyways. Every X posts, insert a block for:

• Follow trending content,
• Follow popular content,
• Follow popular users, etc.  

1 hour ago, Charles said:

Search - A central place to search content in communities. Visitors can find communities talking about a specific subject.

A thought: I would strongly encourage you to prioritize search results by community descriptions vs individual topics.  

You're a car forum.  A user makes one post about nano-reefs in an off-topic forum.  

When someone searches for nano-reefs, your site (which is about cars, just to remind everyone) should not show higher than a forum that is dedicated to nano-reefs.  (Then again, maybe that one nano-reef post is super popular and in the moment, so maybe you do want to algorithmically prioritize it??)

1 hour ago, Charles said:

Sign in with Community Hive - Make it even easier to capture new visitors with privacy-first single-sign-on for your community. Visitors coming to you via Community Hive are already known and vetted so can join with a single click.

This is everything. 

Some thoughts:

• Some thought needs to be put around sharing the CH logins around high risk and adult sites.  For example, you're a 12 year old.  You register on Community Hive.  But then you see an interesting post about nano-reefs, posted on a very pornographic site of voluptuous ladies. You should probably get a warning because, just to be clear, you're 12 years old about to join a porn site of overweight naked ladies.  
• Opt-out.  If Community Hive allows new users to start immediately posting, where their registration information is shared behind the scenes without any front-end friction, then I would be even more sold as a community owner.  
• Something something integration with Gravatar.  

1 hour ago, Charles said:

Our thoughts here are to make Community Hive free and useful for community managers but offer plans for those who want more services from us.

Higher Rank in Discover Feed - There should be a lot of thought that goes into this.  You're becoming an advertising platform.

• If 20 communities become Advanced or Premium, do you plan to show 20 sponsored posts before a user sees any content in their Discover feed? How do you plan to prioritize?   
• What if a Wordpress blog only posts once every month, versus a community that has a post every minute?  Do they pay / appear the same?  
• One thing that's going to turn off users is to show irrelevant sponsored posts. 

[Chris027]

5 hours ago, Charles said:

Hive works best when you follow multiple communities

5 hours ago, Charles said:

think of Community Hive more like a search engine

A bit incongruous. 
 

However, if I like a community and follow it here rather than the activity stream on the actual community, that community’s traffic is reduced. 
 

If people used Hive as a search engine rather than Google or YouTube, it could be beneficial to some communities but given the extremely limited scope of what’s in Hive I can’t see many using it this way. 
 

We’ll just have to see how this goes. It’s obviously in Invision’s best interest to have as many thriving IPS communities as possible. There’s nothing but good intentions with Hive. 

[Convince Me]

10 hours ago, Charles said:

We are not ready to announce pricing but hope to make the paid plans very affordable. In fact, we're trying to target less than $2/month for Advanced.

It is not very clear what you want to charge for. 

[Jimmo]

15 hours ago, Chris027 said:

However, if I like a community and follow it here rather than the activity stream on the actual community, that community’s traffic is reduced. 

If that user though comes directly from Community Hive, you're gaining, potentially, a user you wouldn't have had anyway. If they really are interested in your content, the natural flow of items will bring them to that activity stream like a normal user, cutting out the middle-man, CH.

If you think of it like a search engine and that user was only interested in reading your content once, you only got 1 view and likely a bounce with a low, low chance of returning. With Community Hive, if they find and follow (or keep seeing your content surface in your niche) your community on CH, that's a higher chance to return.

[Charles]

That's right, @Jimmo, and it's also the reason Community Hive only shows a snippet of the content. We want visitors to leave Community Hive and visit your community.

[JoelR]

11 hours ago, Convince Me said:

It is not very clear what you want to charge for. 

Fundamentally, they're charging for higher discoverability in the Hive.  

[Rocketfella]

On 9/4/2023 at 2:58 PM, Charles said:

We are going to make it clearer to people that Community Hive works best when you follow multiple communities. You will also start to see suggestions from Discover in your Following feed. The new Hide options lets you curate this. You are right that if you only follow one community then Community Hive is not very useful. But when you follow more than one it really shines.

If the community you click in "keeps" you then that's great for everyone. The community owner gets a new member, the member finds a community they enjoy, and Community Hive was the service they both appreciate for bringing them together. We are here to help community managers and members come together. Yes, that's the opposite of a social media network but owned communities are the opposite of social media too so we think we are in the right place.

So yes, you are right, and you will see improvements to that this week and next.

Xenforo is certainly a static, aging platform and we are happy to bring a bit of modern thinking to their ecosystem.

 

I can see how some may not "get" what Community Hive is about because they are comparing us to social media. With social media, they are trying to own both your content and those reading your content. Instead, I would think of Community Hive more like a search engine. We are here to connect you to great content but are not claiming any ownership of that content or the people engaging with it.

 

Mini Roadmap Coming Soon:

• Search - A central place to search content in communities. Visitors can find communities talking about a specific subject.
   
• Sign in with Community Hive - Make it even easier to capture new visitors with privacy-first single-sign-on for your community. Visitors coming to you via Community Hive are already known and vetted so can join with a single click.
   
• Community Profiles - Publish a short bio of your community along with a mini-feed of your most popular content. Indexable by Google and friends. 
   
• Backend stuff - Boring, but important, changes on the backend to improve our sorting algorithms, design, user experience, and community management.
   
• More Integrations - Extend our reach to more community platforms.

 

Several have asked, and below is a preview of our paid plans for community managers. Our thoughts here are to make Community Hive free and useful for community managers but offer plans for those who want more services from us.

We are not ready to announce pricing but hope to make the paid plans very affordable. In fact, we're trying to target less than $2/month for Advanced.

We will be launching the paid plans soon but they will all be free during this initial phase. So be sure to sign up to try them out since they will not cost you anything until, I would guess, well into 2024.

Will the pricing be per site or per account?

[Simon]

On 9/4/2023 at 8:06 PM, JoelR said:

1. The premise of Community Hive confuses me. 

What confuses me, unfortunately, is this incredibly confusing website design. It looks like half the site's design is missing or something. And why is this forum hidden away?

[Chris027]

On 9/7/2023 at 2:40 PM, Simon said:

What confuses me, unfortunately, is this incredibly confusing website design. It looks like half the site's design is missing or something. And why is this forum hidden away?

I’m with you 100%
 

I’ve tried to like this site, or is it two sites, but I feel like the stupidest user ever because it gives me a headache trying to figure out how to use it. 
 

I go to the main(?) CH site and can’t even figure out how to find anything. I see no need to return because all I see is posts about Xenforo, not all kinds of communities. 
 

I could search this site, but why would I do that if it only searches 0.0000000000001% of the communities online. It’s like going to Google and telling it to only search a minuscule subset of sites, for no other reason than just because. 

[Markus Jung]

On 9/4/2023 at 8:58 PM, Charles said:

paid plans for community managers

Will the Advanced/Premium Hive plans be included in (which) IC Cloud plans?

[Tracy]

On 9/8/2023 at 7:56 PM, Chris027 said:

I go to the main(?) CH site and can’t even figure out how to find anything. I see no need to return because all I see is posts about Xenforo, not all kinds of communities. 

When you say the "main CH site"... are you talking aobut the support forum (talk.communityhive.com) or the actual CH site that allows you to browse.  If you are seeing XF related topics, odds are it's not the actual CH site, but the support forum since their add-on had some major issues working with/under XenForo since they are more familiar with their own script.

On 9/9/2023 at 7:32 AM, Markus Jung said:

Will the Advanced/Premium Hive plans be included in (which) IC Cloud plans?

This is an issue that I have with this process... honestly, IPS could do this "non gratis" and it could easily be shown as a tax write-off instead of looking at it as an income making proposition.