Re-Resteems Are Gold

Steem has a problem with content discovery. Or that's how it seems based on what some people have written in the past few days. Now that Trending is much cleaner the question arises as to what should be in it. It's up to the community to decide what to put there by upvoting (and downvoting). But the problem is finding good enough content. It's not that it doesn't exist but that it can be difficult to find it.

@fitinfun put together a great comment with a list of curation trails and curators who regularly find good content. Check that out. Also check out @photofeed. It contains curated photography posts most of which do not yet have very high pending rewards. If you like photography at all, you'll find much better content to upvote resteemed by @photofeed than you'll find by following random people here. (Both photos in this post are mine, as usual and always are unless otherwise indicated.)

When you find great content that hasn't been discovered yet I recommend that you give it a big upvote and a resteem. What's even better, if you encounter a resteemed post in your feed that you find really great, resteem it yourself! That's how organic content discovery works on all mainstream platforms. People share and re-share stuff they consider to be particularly good. It's a powerful mechanism for making content go viral and that's precisely what we want here.

That doesn't mean that you should resteem too much. It's a way to get unfollowed or muted if you resteem everything. As a curator you'll need good judgment and you need to develop a sense of what the use base considers to be high quality.

To recap, if you find something you consider to be particularly attractive, share it by resteeming it. Don't be shy to resteem posts that have already been resteemed if you like them very much. Curators and authors now split content rewards 50/50. It's entirely possible for a skillful curator to earn 70-100% of his/her own vote value in curation rewards. Some earn even more than that but that requires careful timing with autovoting. But I believe the very best curation rewards can be attained by going fishing for a gem of a post that hasn't been discovered yet - and upvoting and resteeming it.

P.S.

My own humble opinion is that we should consider populating Trending primarily with non-Steem related content. Someone who stumbles upon Steem(it) for the first time would probably find posts containing too much detailed information about Steem itself can be too confusing. The attention span of the typical internet user is quite short. What we need in Trending is something eye-catching as visual content is the dominant form on the internet. Please give the photography community on Steem a chance. There are several professionals and high-level amateurs curated by @photofeed, which makes it an ideal place to start looking for the most attractive content. Steem-related posts have their place and time and the best should be in Trending but it shouldn't be dominated by them.