On SteemIt, curators are at least as important as content creators, if not more important. As curator you have the power and responsibility to distribute rewards. Curators as a collective have the power to make or break the platform. This article describes some ways to improve your curation system and integrity to increase the overall value of the SteemIt platform and therefore the likelihood it will reach it's maximum potential.

Understand curation rewards

This is possibly the most important factor to increase the overall efficiency of your curation (and the value of the platform). Make sure you have read and completely understood my article curation rewards explained in great detail before you continue!

Reward popular content creators less

There are 3 main reasons why you might want to reduce the amount of rewards you assign to popular content creators:

• Popular content creators are already sufficiently motivated
• When you assign rewards to popular content creators, you are partially responsible for potentially demotivating other quality content creators who would increase the value of the platform when you would reward them sufficiently
• You usually make less money yourself by rewarding popular content creators (as described in my article about curation rewards)

Only focus on rewarding quality content

As a curator you are essentially a moderator of the content on the network. These are some guidelines to follow to keep the value of the SteemIt platform high:

• Make sure your voting power is always at least at 80% (unless you will be away for longer than 24 hours)
• Maintain a high standard of quality
• Never vote without reading at least part of the content
• Decide if you think the content is undervalued, sufficiently valued or overvalued and act accordingly
• Estimate how much motivation the author has based on previous rewards

Self-voting

The question you need to ask yourself is: are you contributing enough to the network to justify this behavior? If you believe the answer is yes, then this isn't a big deal (even if you never curate others) as long as you keep compensating for it in another way.

In case you are no content creator and you don't develop software for the SteemIt platform, then it's likely best to only vote on others. Keep in mind that most people in the world are consumers and only a small minority are content creators, so it's likely that self-voting is not justified in your case.

Don't follow too many people

The best way to curate properly is to have a manageable list of people you follow. Your following list ideally exclusively consists of the very best authors and curators that resteem quality content. If you follow more than a couple of 100 users, you're likely only hurting yourself and everyone you follow, because you cannot efficiently curate every single piece of content that the people you follow publish or resteem. More details can be found in my article why following too many people will only hurt them (and you).

Specifically look for undervalued content

You should at least once in a while invest some of your time to look for (way) undervalued content. Trust me, you'll feel great when you finally found some amazing content and helped the content creator with an upvote, follow and/or resteem! You can't put a price on helping each other. Imagine the feeling you have when one of your posts starts doing really well, that's the feeling you can give to others!

Conclusion

Since there currently is no autonomous system in the SteemIt protocol on the blockchain level that incentivizes you to be a high quality curator and no system that penalizes bad curation behavior, the only way to improve the way the rewards are distributed on the network is to start with yourself! If everyone starts to follow the guidelines described above, the overall value of the network will increase significantly!