Inaugural round of Steem Community Curation: I'm driving steemcurator07!
After a slow start, I have begun my role as a Steem Community Curator with the @steemcurator07 account
Pixabay license, source
And They're Off!
On April 30 and May 1, after a comment and post on the blockchain indicated that keys had been transferred, I was looking for the key. But as of the evening of May 1, it had still not arrived. Eventually, an e-mail arrived asking me to confirm receipt, so I replied immediately.
The funny thing about that email is that the mail header showed that it was sent on April 30. It seems that the message had been bogged down in a mail gateway for something like 24 hours. I'm old enough to remember when that was common with e-mail gateways, but we don't seem to see it very often these days.
Anyway, I replied immediately and received another quick reply that the key would be on its way. It arrived in the early afternoon (US/Eastern time) on May 2. I tested the login right away to verify that it worked, and later that evening began voting on posts. I have been voting on more posts, today, too.
First impression: Finding quality posts that are exclusive to Steem and also in the topics I'm focusing on is hard. Really hard. There are plenty of decent quality posts, but on many of them, the appraisal process reveals that they are also posted on one or more other platforms. It turns out that most of the time being spent is to find out whether a post is exclusive to Steem or not.
I started off with the idea of curating Steem's various categories and communities for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) and Classical-Music. But I quickly learned that there's not enough unique content there to get through 10 or more votes per day, so I expanded and started looking at other tags too. The basic "search" process that I'm following goes something like this:
- Check #steemexclusive tag
- Check STEM communites ( Popular Stem, SteemSTEM, and STEMGeeks )
- Check the Classical Music community.
- Check the category tags for #classical-music, #secretsoforganplaying, #science, and #technology
- Check my other communities
- Check the feed for @steemcurator01
- Check the #music category
- Scroll through all new posts
- In any of those places, when I find a post that I like, I go through some additional checks... (is it on Hive, grab some random text strings and search google for them, do a Google image search for unsourced images in order to look for plagiarized images, etc...)
If anyone's reading this and wondering how to get me to notice your quality post, the easiest thing you can do is probably to tag it with #steemexclusive. (Of course, this implies that it really is exclusive to the Steem blockchain, so please use the tag correctly.)
Another thing you can do is to reply to this post, or one of my weekly curation status posts with a link that you'd like me to see. It can be yours or someone else's. If it's a non-English language post, please put a few sentences of English in the comment to describe the post. I don't promise that I'll vote for the post, but I'll look over as many as I can. You're welcome to suggest links on any topic, but since I'm focusing on STEM and Classical-Music (also folk), links on those topics are probably the most likely to get my curation votes.
Goals
As stated in my community curator application, my curation goal is to vote for 8-12 posts per day in the STEM communities or categories and 1-2 posts per day in Classical-Music. On days one and two, I haven't been able to find anywhere near that many posts, so if you have any interest in these topics, please do contribute!
Additionally, as also stated in my community curator application, I am voting for up to one post per day from my Curating the Internet series. These are self-votes, but they have beneficiary rewards set to share rewards with reply-authors, and authors of other posts that are included in the series, so the value of that vote is being distributed between myself and other Steemizens. The purpose of this once per day (or less) self-vote is to reward engagement, so please join the discussion on those posts.
Beyond the original application, another goal I have is to keep the voting power of the @steemcurator07 account in the 70-90% range. So far, I have not been voting anywhere near enough to meet that goal, mostly because I spend so much time digging through posts that turn out to be posted on multiple platforms.
Conclusion
I'm looking forward to the remainder of the month. Happy posting. I'll be looking for your #steemexclusive posts!
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.
Follow in RSS: @remlaps, @remlaps-lite
Thank you for this very useful feedback Steve.
One of our key goals with encouraging #steemexclusive content is to help build up the value of content on Steem for search engines.
A considerable portion of the traffic to steemit.com is organic search engine traffic.
We assume it is a fair assumption that if the content is on other platforms as well as steemit.com the search engine value is lessened - unless steemit.com is always seen as the original source.
Would be interested in your thoughts on this. And whether the steemexclusive criteria for the Community Curators should be relaxed.
The Steemit Team
Yeah, I agree with the assumption. Basically, off the top of my head, there are five ways to compete for users:
(i) Attractive content (i.e. content that attracts attention)
(ii) Superior blockchain technology
(iii) More/better dapps
(iv) Wider distribution of tokens
(v) More exchange coverage
Since this whole thing is a play on the attention economy, the first might be the most important.
If we don't have exclusive content, that places limits on the ability to compete on content. It's a balancing act, though, because we also need to attract and retain content creators in order to get more attractive content.
I think if I were the one making the decision, I'd allow voting for any content in order to attract users, but impose a cap on the voting percentage for non-exclusive content. For example:
Max vote = 100% for exclusive Steem content, Max = 50% for content that's also found elsewhere.
And in the comment, the curator would note that the post could have earned a higher upvote if the post had been exclusive to Steem.
As the months go by, depending on growth in numbers of active users, I'd start ratcheting down the max percentage for non-exclusive content, until it eventually reached zero.
Of course, the incentive for the curator would then be to vote 50% or less for everyone and not bother to find out if its unique or not, so it's hard to say. Hopefully, curators have enough investment in the value of Steem that they'd understand the importance of exclusive content. If that type of curation behavior emerged, it might have to revert quickly to a requirement for fully-exclusive content.
I am not an 'official' STEEM curator, but I am a curator. :)
I don't apply as 'official' curator because I am rather busy and thus there are days where I can curate a lot, but also other days on which I would clearly miss my own target. I think Steemians with more time and less STEEM power are the best chocie as 'official' STEEM curators ...
If I find exclusive STEEM content, I am willing to upvote it. So far the problem is that as a long time Steemian, most of my friends and also these great authors which I know are posting on both blockchains, which means that so far most of my upvotes are executed on both chains.
In future that may partly change:
Because of these necessary NEW users it is very important to make account creation as easy and fast as possible for everybody, also people without any blockchain experience.
As I think that's a rather important aspect, please allow me to tag you at this point @steemcurator01.
Totally agree, we are working on this...
Thank you
The Steemit Team
Hi @remlaps, this is a very interesting idea...
If you would like to try that approach, we would be in full support, and would be interested to see how it works for you.
Give it a go and keep us posted.
Thank you
The Steemit Team
That's not surprising at all: if an author made the effort to write a post, especially when it was quite some hard work, there is no reason not to try twice to make money with it instead of only once. :)
In my case the average reward of a post is higher than a 100 % upvote of any steemcurator account. That's just an example how people might calculate (I personally think that a higher value of STEEM would be the key to success instead of maximizing my post rewards).
Thanks for the reply. I agree on all points, especially this: "I personally think that a higher value of STEEM would be the key to success instead of maximizing my post rewards". That's why I share beneficiary rewards from many of my posts so aggressively.
Of course, the value of STEEM is facing headwinds at the moment with all of the powerdowns going on.
The difficulty of finding exclusive Steem content is the reason I've been suggesting that people use the #steemexclusive tag. It makes it easier for an author to stand out from the crowd, not just for me, but for other curators, too.
At some point, I imagine that @cheetah will start tagging duplicate content on the Hive chain, but I suppose they're holding off on that during the 13 week powerdown period.
Actually, one of my thoughts is that as long as people are powering down just to dump STEEM, the resulting low STEEM price could be kind of a well deserved punishment for them. :)
Another interesting component is the planned Blurt hardfork. Only STEEM holders (opposite to HIVE holders) will receive the Blurt airdrop at the beginning of July (and thus, the one who has powered down all his STEEM won't receive anything then). Then the STEEM price may rise again in case people will buy STEEM using Blurt ...
These things are all rather complex, but of course in the long run I think that only to produce, find and reward as much as possible quality content combined with effective measures against all the different kinds of abuse will save the day. :)
Good point. Another thought that I've had is that when the price is low, curators will start to realize that the same money can buy a whole lot more influence on Steem than it can on Hive. The Hive witnesses were already highly influential before they left, and all of the changes over there have served to increase their control of their chain a great deal more. They shifted the stake that they might have had to compete with into the proposal system, and by dumping Steem and buying Hive, they increased their staking even more as a percentage of the total.
I'm not familiar with this at all. Is it a real thing? Where can I learn more about it?
Yes, that's a big problem in my eyes: you cannot keep selling something as "decentralized" which is completely under the control of a few persons only.
I forgot if I already gave you the link to my post in which I criticized exactly that.
That's their Discord.
I remember reading that article about Hive decentralization. Didn't realize you were the author, though. It was a good article. That team definitely has definitely been successful in PR, but IMO, that particular talking point and a number of others that have now become "conventional wisdom" have been less than accurate.
Thanks for the Discord link. I don't use Discord much, but I will check it out.
Hi @remlaps, those such as yourself i have been looking to for tag suggestions. Thank you for curating my recent post and it's a good reminder to people to keep curating, this is a community after all
Hi!
I agree with actually everything you say, sounds that I have no opinion, but I have one that's for sure :D Very hard to find exclusiveness, as nearly all authors double dip. And the idea you have to use the tag steemexclusive is something I really applaud. I will also promote the tag from now on!
We sold nearly all the Hi~e we got from the drop and I got basically a 10k Steem account for free. At some point for every hi~e I got 5 Steem, it felt like Christmas!
It is true, much much easier to gain influence on Steem now than ever before. Nearly impossible on the forked chain because like you said, the whales are the same, they just changed the color of their jersey.
Tomorrow Cryptokannon and I will launch the curation project with new discord. We would LOVE to have you on the team!
I actually got the #steemexclusive tag idea from @whatsup, but I agree that it's a really good idea. I hope others will start posting with and curating that tag.
Thanks! I'm not much of a discord user, but I'll join and try to stay active.
Thank you! The Steeming Curators @steemingcurators is still Work in Progress, but we will get there! Thank you for joining in, you are awesome! Here is the invite:
https://discord.gg/K7aM3Zz
Hello dear friend @remlaps. I wish you much success, in what you have just undertaken.
Have a wonderful weekend