Here is a gif I made just for you guys, cable access style.
Some of my thoughts here might become irrelevant once SMTs come out, but i'm going to address some issues as I see them. We're all in this together, and transparency is an awesome aid in communicating with communities. I thought i'd share a bit of my process with curating on steem and the hurdles I see the platform facing. If you read my recent introductory post you would understand some of the philosophy behind my curating here on steem. Right now my impact may be small, but I believe in the search for better systems and I would like to help put Steem to the test. I've begun to adopt the harvester mentality in my life, and my main priority is seeding a wide range of creative folks on steem, not only because I think it will help grow the platform, but I want artists to succeed.
I upvote art I personally enjoy and find meaningful. I aim to build the community in a way that has:
- Diversity - free thought is a wide range of thought
- Strong voices - Artists with something to say, and a distinct style.
- Support for the little guys
Incentivising new users has several hurdles, we have to keep it honest on here, there are a few things that make it exceptionally hard to curate on our platform when we compare it to other types of social media. We have a huge spam problem from both bots and meatspace monkeys. Other issues are copyright literacy/morality, big accounts "gaming" the system, monetary distribution problems. These are very had topics, and I'm not looking to address solutions to these problems, rather effects of they have had on me as a curator so far.
Vote impact rides with the price, and the reward pool is thin these days. I have an account worth $6500 currently, when curating if I put in roughly 5 hours a week, I might make 3.5 steem. If I put in 10, i'd make 5 steem in a week. At the current price of steem that's like $4/h. Is that a good payout for the amount of steem, and the amount of work I do for it? It's hard to say really. Wouldn't be for most. at $100k worth of steem I'd be making $80/h! So here is an issue with curating. Steem doesn't reward quality curating (except a little) It rewards efficient voting, and you make it more efficient for your self by having a larger stake. The game theory suggests that if you own a bigger stake you will work harder and curate better but I would argue this is not enough. The curation reward algorithm is very simple, just a means for "PoB"; the "Proof of Brain" can be just as efficient in greed, or with cleaver bots, as much as careful hard work. In my opinion steem needs to hire more curators in order to be successful. There are several steem delegation initiatives, as a way to hire curators, but there needs to be more of this.
Problem: New users are coming to steem and getting forgotten before they are ever found, enough that further use of the platform is discouraged.
To get steem off the ground, we need to make it an attractive place for non-crypto users who will bring and engage with quality content. We need more accounts which are focused on incentivising new users, and building a good base for the platform.
Right now my upvote is only worth 40 cents on a good day, so I figured the best kind of contribution I can give to the network right now is in discovering newly recruited talent, giving it a little boost in visibility. I see this as lowering the noise floor, or increasing the amplitude on the post, giving it that much more of a chance to be seen. With this in mind I have been treating this account (@solar) as a kind of bottom feeder for content on steem. There is so much good content every day that is just drowned in spam. A few times a week I go to the NEW section on any particular art tag and just keep scrolling, and scrolling and scanning. Any time i see some interesting piece of art I open a new tab on the user. Once I have more tabs open than I can handle, I sort through all the users, filter out the spam accounts. If the users generally posts interesting content, then I subscribe, vote on my favorite recent post and finally resteem it if I think it's really solid. Every time I do this I find 2-8 people I might subscribe to. Building a good feed has proven valuable but it requires maintenance, and good filtering options are so sparse it hurts.
I have a few questions for you all:
- I'm curious if other curators have a kind of routine, what is your process like?
- What kinds of tools help you filter your feed, or sort through the tags on steem?
- Any one know how tags on the sidebar are decided? Any links to how steemit.com handles that?
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I'd like to keep these discussions open, Even if the original post expires. So feel free to reply two weeks from now, or three years from tomorrow and we can see how the platform is doing then!
Hey, i'm not sure if this is correct, but I'm pretty sure the tags on the sidebar are about quantity of people/posts using them. My own frustration is their isn't sub genres/tags. For instance, I like to use #illustration, but that could nest under #art and show up in both but still count as one tag. Some people might prefer Art> Design or Art>Photography or whatever. I'm sure it's the same with other areas of Steemit.
A tool that I think would be useful for curators would be the ability to track tags. Say there is one that there is often quality content in, but you don't remember to check it because it's not on the sidebar list. Tracking or saving tags would really help with the goal of finding lesser known users.
Or maybe these exist and I haven't figured out how to use them, but it should definitely be more user friendly if that is the case.
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Yeah, steem is interesting because its a database which has an API, anyone with the skills and time can make any tools they like for it. Im a bit surprised there hasn't been more effort to build better filtering tools.
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Hi @solar. First off thanks for the support you've recently shown me. I try to investigate good curators and try to see what they're about because I assume it's someone I can connect with who also cares about the platform.
Some of what you're talking about in your post here are issues that I've been brainstorming about lately as well. I'll share some of my ideas and thoughts.
As you mentioned the brand new user experience on Steemit is rough to say the least, and I think what you're doing is a good solution to help with that. My idea was to potentially try to make more people like you. Basically someone who has enough SP to at least move the needle a little who is actively curating on the platform.
I was thinking of maybe making a separate account and starting a curation trail that would support artists who are active, consistent contributors AND active curators. The difference between my curation trail and some others that exist though are that instead of focusing on new talent we would focus on rewarding consistency. So that these users could serve as a foundation to build the art community.
The idea is still a work in progress, but where I'm at now is I'm thinking, we'd have something like a whitelist that artists can apply for. We'd review their posts and their curation history and based on that accept or reject them. After they'd been accepted, the curation trail would upvote ALL of their art related posts, serving as a bit of a baseline for people that have a proven track record of delivering and curating quality content.
As long as these users continue to do what they're doing they will stay on the whitelist until they hit some upper threshold of SP, at which point, the hope would be that they just continue to curate, but now with more power.
I'm thinking the trail would support x number of artists until it's voting power hits y value that I'd have to work out, and after it exceeds a certain value it would have an opening for a new applicant to apply. This (if this idea went anywhere) would also incentivise users to curate as well as create which I think is important, if they wanted to be added when there was a new opening.
That's where things are at now, would love to hear if you have an opinion, even if it's that it's a terrible idea, I'd rather poke holes in it now before I start to take real steps to make it happen. I think it's awesome what you're doing btw!
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Yeah I i think it's on the right track. If you keep it to certain types of parameters there will probably be delegation support for it. I've been telling people for a while if they make good posts and are consistent they will do well over time. But steem is a big time commitment, it takes time. It's really more of a "Proof of LaborTime" algo, mixed in with pay to play, and touch of god syndrome (my post got upvoted by a whale!). I'm interested in doing a combination first and second level filtering, and finding ways to pay curators more. There are some successful projects that have started in this sort of way but it seems like many of these types of projects stall out, and I wonder why that is (the other steem browsers).
Ultimately I'd like to build something that is a foundation for connecting artists to the world in new ways. If decentralized media can take off, it will be a huge step. The monetary distribution on steem isn't encouraging though.
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you know utopian.io they are doing some great things.
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