The End of My Delegation, and the Continuation of My Journey
The other day, not only did my video card fry, the day after one of my RAM modules fried, but I also lost my delegation. So it wasn't exactly a great day.
I never expected that the delegation would last forever. I always assumed it could be taken at any moment. Of course, I never expected to actually get it either.
I had never talked to @fulltimegeek, as far as I'm aware. I don't know him. When I got the delegation, it was a complete surprise. I kinda freaked out a little bit.
I kept waiting for him to contact me, but he never did. I don't know if he checked up on my posts occasionally, or checked my upvotes, or what.
Sure, it sucks to not have it anymore, but I'm grateful that I had the opportunity that I had. Many minnows might never experience what it's like to have 5000 SP. Especially now that Steem is worth more (though not quite as much more this week), and it's harder to power up.
He Needs His Steem Power Back
I don't know all the details about the abuse of the pool, but I understand why a lot of users are upset about it. Steem relies on all the users following the underlying social pressure to curate good content, and not abuse the system. Yes, you can vote for yourself and your friends, but that's not really what the purpose of this site is. We're supposed to work together to ensure good content gets rewarded.
Voting for shit content just because it's possible is completely ignoring the social pressure, and what this site was created for, and it's liable to get a few people upset.
Likewise, paying people for their votes, while technically possible, is also ignoring the purpose of the site, and abusing the system, to get rewards back that you did not earn through hard work and dedication.
It is, of course, up to every user to decide their own moral beliefs on what they deem acceptable. However, another user may take issue with it, and choose to flag you.
Bots and The Great Self Debate
I myself decided to become a member of @qurator. For me, this is borderline acceptable. Another user recently described it as a circle jerk though, and I can see his point. Their requirement to upvote all their posts at a certain level, and their means of checking it, mean that you are pretty much forced to use an auto-voter. I would much rather people actually read the posts.
The reason I decided it was acceptable is that they require a certain level of quality in the user's posts that they accept. Personally, I would prefer this quality level was a bit higher, especially in regards to the posts that they include in The Daily Qurator, but I don't run it.
I view the combination of the initial approval, and The Daily Qurator, as making it a bit closer to paid curation than necessarily just a bot.
I'm moving more towards delegating to them over time though, rather than upvoting their posts. I will still upvote them when I read them though. I would rather spend my votes on things I actually read, and judge how deserving they are of upvotes on my own.
Qurator is part of my effort to create a baseline income for my posts. If I end up getting a certain amount from users that put me on auto-voters though, I'll have to stop delegating to them, because I would rather not be rewarded a great amount for even my stupid memes, unless people see them, and decide for themselves. Receiving great rewards for whatever you do, whether you put in effort or not, feels like one possible hell that I'd rather not visit.
I likewise have yet to make a post that I think is good enough that I'd buy a vote for. I know that if I make a truly awesome post, it will be recognized, because while I'm still not earning much, I have formed a group of friends and social connections. That's a big key to success here.
Curation Efforts
When I was brand new, I thought it might be cool to be a curator. I had no idea how I could convince someone I'd be a good curator though. After having the master sword for a while though, I realized that it's far more work to be a curator than I could have ever imagined.
There are tons of awesome amazing incredible posts out there. The problem is finding them. Once you have more than a little SP, you realize that not every post deserves a 100% upvote. You have to ask yourself on every post just how much it deserves. I didn't necessarily ask myself how much it deserved in dollar value, beyond if it was overvalued, because there are a ton of posts that are undervalued. I can't give every undervalued post a 100% upvote. So I asked myself how much of my vote it deserved.
I realized very quickly it's not a one-man job. It takes too many minutes and even hours to read through a ton of posts to find the best.
We Need Curator Tools.
I don't know why Steemit doesn't have tools for curators to work together, built-in, but it needs them. I think it's a horrible oversight to not have them. I found myself so often thinking that I needed to work with others to find and share the posts that I thought were the best.
The current curation groups are hard to contact though, and it takes time and effort to form your own official one. Whenever I did find that occasional amazing post that I thought really deserved an upvote, I couldn't do anything with it other than give it a 100% upvote. I kind of just wanted to share posts with a group of friends to make the task a bit easier.
Whenever I thought about forming an official curation group, I wasn't quite sure what kind of post genres to curate. My mind just kept going back to the tools.
I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but I kind of think I need some way to work with others to curate together. Some way that limits the amount of spam and crap.
My Personal Goals
Before I received the delegation, I really wanted to get a big upvote eventually. After I got it, and knew what it was like, I wanted to more than double it. I knew what it was like to have a big upvote, and I wanted more.
Now, it's gone, but I still want it.
I have set a few goals for myself.
500 Steem Power
I chose trading over powering up to 500 right away. Then I got delegation, and there seemed to be less of a rush. Rather than rush right away to power up to 500, given that I have things I am working towards, I am trading to get able to do it. I'd like to get up to 500 steem power by the end of the month however, or perhaps the begining of the next, if that's more favorable.
1000 Steem Power
1000 Steem is a lot of money. All the same, I'd like to be able to get to 1000 SP by the end of next month. I'm not sure if I'm going to really push this goal though, as other things are more important.
5000 Steem Power
This is the amount of delegation I received from @fulltimegeek, and when I still had it, I still had the goal of eventually getting 5000 SP of my own. Now, I still have that goal, but while setting these goals on a timeline, I got the insane idea of trying to get 5000SP by the end of the year. I won't be that sad if I don't make it though. It's important that I work towards it, not that I necessarily reach it.
The Future
I haven't been able to live up to my lofty personal goals with this account yet, but I haven't given up, and I don't plan to. I have ideas. I have posts I want to make. I have goals to reach. I will make them. I will succeed.
Every day's a journey. It's time I start walking.
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I am not sure of the development time but I watched the panel of witnesses hosted by @aggroed Witness Panel and @carlgnash I think mentioned that especially for @curie they are working on a open source curators tool so we can also better filter out the crap my words not theirs. Have you tried SCT by @steemchiller , I don't really use steemit.com itself as much and think it is built to work with that but it has built in filters and you can add more, also follow favourite authors or star posts for review.. Could help you with being able to curate better, also I do not have that problem now I give curie a few votes on their trail and keep 50% for myself to vote things I like .
But in your case with more power comes more responsibility.
I haven't tried that tool, no. It looks interesting.
I tried following curie's trail before...I didn't like it. I ended up checking all the upvotes and reversing some.
I hope they do release an open source tool for curation, and others do as well. I think it's likely we need quite a few tools, especially as the steemiverse grows.
Maybe for now an advanced google search is best, problem is knowing what to search , myself I don't know what I want to read or see, until I see it, so tag specific things don't really matter to me. I see sct you can filter by rep and combine with a word list which might help
I think we should just buy each other votes, like you would someone a drink.. I mean if bots are out, I'm gonna use em to get myself and the people I like to see ahead. I like the amount of thought you put into this. I wanna remind you to stay super ambitious --I wanna hear the conviction in your voice. I got to almost 300 SP in an unreasonable time, but that's cause I focused on unreasonable growth. We can both crush 500, even 1000 SP easily. You just need a rival. Someone to drive you. I wanted to be as nasty as @mrwanderlust for portraits, and pensive as @tarazkp with his thoughts, when I first started. I still do, but I did stall out for a bit. Not anymore.
Let's go.
LOL! @lemony-cricket wanted to challenge me to a power-up race, but these are my own personal goals, and they're reliant on me working really hard trading, and posting.
Sorry about your video card and your delegation :( and I can bring myself to use any kind of bot although everyone tell me it is the only way I will be seen, it feels dirty and dishonest like doing 5$ tricks in the back alley for upvotes ...emm > No ew! And seriously I rather have a good convo over a piece then upvotes from people who never even read it
If promotion actually worked and wasn't so expensive, I would consider that more than the bots.
It is frustrating to not be rewarded for your hard content.
That's why I looked for paid curation services and ended up using qurator. It's not as much of paid curation as I would like, but it's not exactly just a bot either.
nods I can understand doing it i just can't myself. I have given myself a year if things are not better until then i will give up . I really see so much more potential for this platform than just content i just don't know if human greed will ruin it all. For now i am here one overlooked post at a time Lol <3
Steemit needs curation tools – without question. But think about what those curation tools would actually be and what problems they would actually solve?
You want tools to help you find good content to up vote. So does the average user, looking for things which are relevant to their interests.
You want tools to make voting much less a hands-on affair, to help you use your voting power efficiently. So does the average user, maybe even more so than a devoted curator, because they assume that in doing so they'll be a better member of the community.
You want the ability to find other people who want to curate the same way? So does the average user; we call those "communities," and Steemit has done a crappy job of actually providing that kind of functionality for anyone to use.
It strikes me that everything that a "good curator" could make use of, the average user would also get extreme satisfaction from. They are all just things which would make the user experience on the platform far superior.
There are times that I wish I had an off-site "bot" which would manage my voting for me. All I'd need to do is hand it my votes as I want to do them and if we are in the vote window, it would simply delay until about the 20 minute mark before voting (and have I mentioned how much I hate this whole voting window concept?), And would simply sit on the rest of my votes until just before the end of the payout window for any particular article and vote at a percentage such that all of my votes on either side stay at a consistent voting level. It will know how many votes I had made in the previous 24 hours and it will know how many votes I have to make in the next 24 hours. This should just be a basic bit of math.
Maybe an advanced bit of math. But calculable.
That alone would go a long way toward making voting less of a nightmare operation and probably make curation a lot easier to deal with, so that you could just go find content that was good and vote for it, and let the machine worry about setting percentages and values.
Discovery itself is a whole different problem. I've written several articles on that and I have talked to some folks about various lexicographic and semantic relationship construction systems to try and build corpora of interesting and useful content in order to simply be able to say "I want more stuff like this" and have a chance of getting it. It's nontrivial. Possible, but nontrivial.
There's work to be done, there.
Essentially, the platform needs tools that make using it pleasurable. It is not a lot of fun to use Steemit. Or at least – to use Steemit as a serious part of your social media day. Some of the content is fun, but the platform itself almost goes out of its way to get in the way of that fun.
External tools can help with that, but I suspect that a lot of people are hanging back, waiting to see what happens with the new hardfork – and that wait is not doing any good for the platform as a whole.
I don't know what to tell you. It is what it is.
Sorry it took me so long to reply to this one. It kinda got lost in the pile while doing other things.
You're right that the majority of the tools that curators would need would be useful for every user.
One of the major things that we need is the ability to create REAL communities. I don't mean just a group account like it seems like they're creating. We need to be able to share posts with a group of friends without going off-site. Preferably we would be able to create subgroups and even have private ones that were encrypted. I suppose the subgroups could be done by actually making the group a post, but I'm not sure if private communication is implemented yet.
I'm not sure I necessarily do need that. Though I would like a delay for voting, because of that stupid fucking timer bullshit.
You talking about it holding onto the votes did make me think that perhaps I would like a way for a bot to auto-vote before I get 100% though.
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