Changes to the OCD structure and payouts

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Many of you are already aware of the @ocd project which stands for Operation Curation Delegation and was one of my inventions back when I received delegated stake to curate with. Its goal ever since the beginning has been to find and reward newcomer authors that write quality original content and have been overlooked by most since there is also a lot of spam on the Steem network with the increasing user-base.

I am very proud of this project and so happy to have found amazing curators to help it grow and become one of the biggest curation projects on the platform. We have ever since the beginning been striving for transparency and that's also why the new changes will be written in this post so that anyone can see them.

First off, a short rundown of how the project has been working so far for the curators.

A curator in the team finds an undervalued post, he/she then proceeds to nominate the author by asking if they are okay with one of their images and a description to their post having a chance of being added to the daily compilation post which is posted on the @ocd account and gains more visibility and rewards from our curators. If the author agrees the curator then places the post on a discord channel where all of the other curators involved in the project vote on the nominations to be used the next day.

The nominations in questions are often under $10 post reward value and get curated up to $20, this has of course differed over time as prices swing and SBD being crazy it has also meant that the nominations often get a lot more than $20 rewards, but our goal has been to always reward the authors more than what the curators make through the compilation post for finding it.

Initially my goal with the project was to receive some delegation so the curators wouldn't need the extra incentive from post rewards but could share the curation rewards instead, since that hasn't happened (yet at least) we have continued posting 2 compilation posts a day, one for 10 english posts and the other for 10 international native posts. If this changes we will of course adapt with it. The curators have received 75% of the post rewards, the remaining 25% have belonged to me and remained with the @ocd account. This was initially set up to help me receive some rewards back from the sacrifice that my curation on older posts and being the last curator caused when running a curation trail which didn't follow on posts older than 1 day which most of the nominations consist of, but since the price of Steem has increased a lot it was about time for a change which I will bring up later in the post.

The way the nominations have functioned have left a lot of leeway for curators from other projects to swoop in and find an undervalued and qualified post through our curators to use in other curation projects and profit from very little work, we have noticed this happen a lot during the past. We wanted to check out if there are certain curators doing it more often than others to notice if it was by mistake or not but we figured the trouble was not worth the effort as our combined goals are to reward the authors no matter what way it happened. To minimize the risk of this happening we are instead changing the way we nominate and since there have been no authors in the past denying a nomination from @ocd we believe that it will work this way too - more on this on the changes below.

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The changes in how we nominate

Instead of asking first and nominating and posting after, we will instead start nominating posts in our "ocd-curators-only" discord server and after the compilation posts we will notify the authors about it and they will have up to 7 days time to let us know if they want their image and description of their nominated post revoked from the compilation post.

This change will make our curators life a lot easier as they won't have to wait for an answer which often takes a lot of time or never happens due to the notifications on the site not working and the nominations being sniped from curators of other projects.

Changes in amount of daily nominations

Currently with about 15 english curators and 20 language ones we have only added 10 english nominations to the compilation posts and the same amount to language posts, this has resulted in many curators having had to skip certain days and the language curators having to add their nominations every other day and co-operating with the other one from the same language.

With the recent price changes we want to grow the project but we also need to keep in mind that voting power is not limitless, but getting the nominations up to $20 has become easier for our curators due to the price changes and we believe we are ready to double the amount of daily nominations and adding some more curators to the team to make sure we have full compilation posts daily.

Changes in voting power going towards compilation posts and nominations

Since the beginning I have been striving to vote a solid 10% vote per nomination of a curator's rewards and give the authors between 2-2.5x more rewards. Things have changed lately due to us being 2 manual curators with more stake covering the posts now and with the price increase we are changing it to 5% now and it will fit well with getting the nominations up to $20. This might at first look like the curators will receive a lot less rewards for their curation, but with the changes below and them having been "overpaid" a bit as of late due to the price changes I believe we will find a nice equilibrium considering they will also have an increased chance of their nomination making it to the compilation post.

Changes in reward distribution of the team

Post rewards will now go 100% to the curators in the team, up from 75%. Before this I have been receiving 25% of the SP from the post rewards, even though the 50% SP has not been a lot lately considering the value of the other half of the posts being in SBD this change is to help grow the project even more with curators and being able to cover more undervalued posts in the future and incentivize the curators which is needed if you've followed the recent debates how curation rewards are not as effective as post rewards.

Looking at @ocd's latest payouts, SP being around 180 a week, this will increase the curators stake in the project which I'm glad many have left there to grow as they believe in the value of Steem going up as much as most of us others do.

Curation rewards will now instead go 100% towards me, up from 50%. Curation rewards from the @ocd account have been about 30 SP weekly of which I have been receiving 50% of which also have remained on the @ocd account. My plans in the future are to continue delegating to the account from my own SP and this way instead front-run some of the bigger votes going to nominations for once which are mainly being cast by me and @anomadsoul.

The net change would be a loss of 90 SP weekly for me from the post rewards and a gain of 15 SP weekly from the curation rewards. These changes here will rely on if the project receives any other delegation from other users and will be adjusted accordingly when that time comes.

Changes in stakes and re-steems

We have had a few special cases in the project where we have awarded extra stakes to curators in the team doing different jobs, the stakes have been tied to the total SP of the curators in the @ocd account and have gone towards those curating the 3 re-steems a day, one curator having the job as an accountant keeping the distribution updated and one making sure that all nominations are original and not plagiarized. This has resulted in some of the SP being diluted over time and giving a slight edge to newcomers earning stakes this way.

To combat this we will be resetting the stakes quarterly so that the SP gained during a quarter will remain the same amount for life-time as long as the curators are in the project and have their SP within the @ocd account. Since the re-steems have been the major influencer to the dilution we will now start rewarding the re-steem comments with some post rewards to make up for the dilution and incentivize the curation of re-steems too. We will also be posting the weekly updates of stakes and rewards on a specific account and rewarding the accountant with some post rewards that way instead of receiving stakes.

The daily re-steems will increase from 3 to 6 once these changes take effect and will be increased over time as the project grows with curators, so make sure to tag your posts with #ocd-resteem for a chance to be curated by us but bear in mind that an author can only get re-steemed once a month. If you do receive a re-steem from us you'll make our job a lot easier by refraining from tagging it again for a month.

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These are all the major changes and we will be discussing with the team when they will take effect. I haven't talked about many of these with the team yet, but I am sure they will like most of these changes as it helps both them to do their work easier and to cover more undervalued authors daily.

Keep a look out on my future posts as I will be searching for some more curators to add to the project and hopefully soon more languages as well.

Thanks for reading and all of the positive feedback you've given to the project!

[Image from Pixabay.]

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