I think the website deeponion.info gives some insight in this. Also the dropouts are visible (in number and in name). Full transparency.
Has someone an explanation why only 290 are accepted while more than 600 are rejected? And are those rejects also only the temporarily rejected who didn't manage to post every week? So few accepted means that a quite high reward for those still in...
I posted my theory before but I will post it again.
Facebook did one thing right: build community before going for the big masses. Facebook did this in the Harvard student community, and only after this community was up and running, the network expanded further outside of the realms of Harvard.
Community makes a network thrive, not the network itself.
DeepOnion must compete with a lot of other 'networks'. Not a few, but
a lot. If you have been reading up on DeepOnion, you may have noticed that a couple of items have been heavily borrowed from other projects:
*TOR connectively: DeepOnion not the first
*DeepVault: DeepOnion not the first (it is derived from the Supercoin project
*probably some other things too, like the basic concept of PoS
But that does not matter.The thing that makes DeepOnion different is that the creators (and the much larger group of people currently driving this project forward), is
community. We are building a community, small as it is, that is devoted and is willing to go that extra mile. Taking one for the team. Spending time to work on promotion. Spending a lot of time on moderation. Spending a decade (or half) on coding this project. This is our little 'Harvard' now, working on making this project survive and increasing to something inevitable.
There is no greater power than a group watching another group. If we as 'another group' make this project shine, the effect of the outside group watching this little melting pot of creativity,
progress and
results, more will come over time, increasing the network value of DO considerably. But we are no means there yet.
And that is the reason the strict airdrop rules are in place. We need to stick to that small devoted group for now. Our little Harvard. Making it work. Make a happy bunch. Vibrating energy to the outside world. Resulting in that outside force (the large group) wanting to be a part of this so bad, that after a year it does not matter anymore whether someone wants to dump this coin for a quick buck. And perhaps a quick buck well deserved.
Just like we have negative stories in the cryptocurrency field, we also have positive stories. And DeepOnion will be one of those positive stories.