EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/WSrMJ.png)
Greetings fellow members of the Starcraft community!
I am writing this post as a spokesperson for a group of people who’s truly fascinated about Starcraft and the community (r)evolving around the game. We spend countless hours every day playing, watching, reading and experiencing Starcraft. And yes, WE ARE ENTERTAINED. We do appreciate the scene to it’s fullest extent, yet we are still professional lurkers and we are not contributing to the community’s growth in any way except by being another tick on the streams viewer counters. But we would like to change that and be more involved in the community.
So we started asking ourselves; how can we contribute to this magnificent source of entertainment? Well, the answer was kind of simple as we all work with them internetz for a living. We should develop something useful for the community in form of a website. So we started to put a lot of thought towards what kind of website could be useful for the community, which really isn’t an easy task. We like the fact that the community is somewhat centered around TL.net and /r/starcraft and we would not like to change that. So we started thinking about how we could enhance these sites and the community as a whole, what do we really need?
The answer was the following:
An utility support site for all the contributors of the community. Sounds weird? It is, but we do think it is something that would take the community as a whole to the next level.
Why?
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We love all the different content getting published every day within the community. Wheter it is a live stream, a VOD, a strategy guide, a wallpaper, a song, a blog post, anything, it doesn’t matter - we love it. We love the dedication, the time and the effort that you guys put down on these things. The only “problem” we see with these things is that they disappear way so fast. If you have made something really appreciated you get your 24 hours of fame before your post vanishes into the massive wave of new things getting posted. And the only credit you got from it was some positive comments and a healthy batch of Reddit karma, which definitely is enough for most people. But what if we had some other incentive besides comments and upvotes? What kind of content would get published then? Our guess is way more content and content with way more depth.
We’re talking about monetization, people! But not in that scary corporate fashion. There is a lot of money in the Starcraft scene but it is divided kind of unproportionally since it is only the top tier of the community that gets a share. What we want to achieve is to make it possible for the general bulk of contributors to get some more credit for their hard work.
We’re talking about monetization, people! But not in that scary corporate fashion. There is a lot of money in the Starcraft scene but it is divided kind of unproportionally since it is only the top tier of the community that gets a share. What we want to achieve is to make it possible for the general bulk of contributors to get some more credit for their hard work.
How?
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We want to build an utility site where you as a consumer easily can find your favorite contributor and show your support to him/her. Or from a contributors point of view, a site where you can compile and organize all of your work in one place instead of it being spread out on all of the different sites like TL, Twitch, Youtube etc. Note that we do not in any way want to draw traffic away from these sites, the content will still be hosted there and we will only build a library consisting of links to the original source.
Basically the site will consist of profiles, and you can add all of your Starcraft related information and contributions to your profile for people to find. But how do you support the contributor by just finding all of his/hers creations? Answer: you can connect your profile to Kickstarter, PayPal and Flattr. The latter will be the one we will intergrate the most with the site as Flattr is very suitable for this kind of platform. The thing with Flattr is that it’s not just focused on money, it’s more focused on flattering the contributor, a small gesture of your appreciation. It’s like an upvote/Facebook like with a micro donation attached to it. You add a specific amount of money every month to your account, let’s say $4, and then that amount gets divided over all of your Flattrings that month. So if you Flattr two items, they both receive $2, if you Flattr ten items, they receive 20c and so on. Read more about the concept of Flattr here.
You will be able Flattr anything put up on the site as well as anything on a external site with a Flattr button on it. With this we will be able to keep track of anything Flattred and make lists of what’s hot right now overall and based on categories like Streams or Players.
Basically the site will consist of profiles, and you can add all of your Starcraft related information and contributions to your profile for people to find. But how do you support the contributor by just finding all of his/hers creations? Answer: you can connect your profile to Kickstarter, PayPal and Flattr. The latter will be the one we will intergrate the most with the site as Flattr is very suitable for this kind of platform. The thing with Flattr is that it’s not just focused on money, it’s more focused on flattering the contributor, a small gesture of your appreciation. It’s like an upvote/Facebook like with a micro donation attached to it. You add a specific amount of money every month to your account, let’s say $4, and then that amount gets divided over all of your Flattrings that month. So if you Flattr two items, they both receive $2, if you Flattr ten items, they receive 20c and so on. Read more about the concept of Flattr here.
You will be able Flattr anything put up on the site as well as anything on a external site with a Flattr button on it. With this we will be able to keep track of anything Flattred and make lists of what’s hot right now overall and based on categories like Streams or Players.
User case, contributor:
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loC.Fate is a Starcraft player on the rise. He’s got a stream and is starting to get a lot of viewers, but the ad revenue from his stream and Youtube is not high enough for him to be able to make a living out of it which means he can not get enough time to practice due to his day time job. loC.Fate creates an account on our site and starts to add all of his content to his profile. He begins to add himself as a player, then continues to add the following:
- Twitch channel
- Youtube channel
- Personal homepage
- Facebook page
- Guides, strategies and blog posts he’s been posting on TL.net
- Fan art he’s been posting on deviantART
He then continues to add every Youtube clip he is proud of separately to his profile. As Fate is a member of the team loC, and the team has made Flattr buttons possible to integrate on their site, Fate can connect his profile on our site to the Flattr button attached to his profile on the loC site.
- Twitch channel
- Youtube channel
- Personal homepage
- Facebook page
- Guides, strategies and blog posts he’s been posting on TL.net
- Fan art he’s been posting on deviantART
He then continues to add every Youtube clip he is proud of separately to his profile. As Fate is a member of the team loC, and the team has made Flattr buttons possible to integrate on their site, Fate can connect his profile on our site to the Flattr button attached to his profile on the loC site.
User case, consumer:
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Bonell Stevenson works as a web developer and loves to watch competitive Starcraft on his spare time. He’s been watching a new streamer a lot lately, loC.Fate, and have really been enjoying it. He feels like he wants to show his appreciation to Fate so he goes to our site and finds Fates profile. He Flattres the profile itself and Fate’s channel on Twitch.tv. He then browses through the profile and finds the links to Fate’s guides on TL and continues to press them as he hasn’t seen them before. Bonell find the guides really informational and decides to give them a Flattr aswell and continues to browse Fate’s profile to see if there is something else of interest.
The project
As this is something we do for fun and something we do as a contribution to the Starcraft community, we would love to hear your thoughts on the project. We want to develop this platform with you, not for you. This is our vision of how it could work and not the final one. If the community comes up with a better way to do this, then we would gladly modify the concept until everyone is satisfied. If it turns out everyone thinks this is an horrible idea, we will simply kill the project. But then we at least tried to make our contribution as a way of repaying the community for all the entertainment it has given us the past two years.
If we continue with this project we would love to involve you in as many ways as possible, like naming the site, designing a logo, coming up with functions and features etc. If you are really good at developing web platforms or is a graphic designer with knowledge of how to design for the web, please do contact us if you want to contribute. Especially the latter one since none of us are expert designers.
We have started a basic Wordpress blog for the project where you can follow our progress. Use the comment system to ask us questions as this post disappears to the depths of the internet. You can also follow the project on GitHub if you know your code.
projecthive.wordpress.com
github.com/simme/projecthive
GL HF,
The Hive Project
