Curie Weekly Update (26th Dec 2016 to 1st Jan 2017) - Special Edition
In spirit of Curie's transparency, we wish to use this weekly section as an ongoing development blog on our project to communicate our progress on top of the many casual exchanges happening in channel #curie.
- For those new to Curie, please follow @curie, and join us in #curie on Steemit.chat.
- We invite curators to submit posts from new authors in #curie on Steemit.chat. A finder's fee of 8 Steem is available for each upvoted post.
- Follow @curie's votes to support the authors. Please consider following our trail and voting for curated authors. If you are a Streemian user, @curie is an available trail to follow.
- Curie continues its focus on supporting new authors. Semi-established authors are supported by Steem Guild.
- Remember to follow and interact with authors that you love whenever going through The Daily Curie.
- Wishing the Steemit community a Happy New Year!
Looking forward to 2017
Since it's inception in mid-August, Curie has voted on 11,500 posts and considered hundreds of thousands of posts. In this time, SBD 350,000 has been generated for our curated authors. Over 350 curators have been rewarded for submitting posts, with approximately 2,500 authors rewarded. In terms of engagement, this is by far the most significant project on Steemit, which has quietly - almost invisibly - kept operating smoothly through the tough times. Curie is a complex project, and there is a lot of misunderstanding about its operations. Feel free to reach out to @donkeypong, @kevinwong or @liberosist on Steemit.chat if you have any concerns or queries about the project.
Project Curie started off with humble beginnings in mid-August with an internal curation team. Two weeks later, Curie was announced publicly, and submissions open to #curie at Steemit.chat. #curie has grown from strength to strength and today hosts 700 users and over a hundred curators submitting posts every week. Each day, 100-200 posts are submitted into Curie. This is the largest collaborative effort on Steemit, and continues to grow.
Over the last couple of months, the sheer volume of submissions have been overwhelming, while our budget continued to decline. To keep the project under check, we have had to tighten the guidelines. Indeed, today, the guidelines are perhaps far too strict. Still, the interest in the project is at an all time high, and we see new curators join the channel and submit posts every day.
Announcing development of Curie's frontend
As already briefly announced in #curie, in the early months of 2017, we intend to commission development of an automated frontend. We'll make it as complete as our budget would allow, but to begin with we are looking at a simple submission system that will automatically check posts for guidelines and forward them to voters. Accounting has become a daunting task for our team, and this process will now be further automated by this frontend.
For curators in #curie this will mean fewer guidelines, higher submission limits, and a drastic reduction in the minimum elapsed time down from 6 hours to maybe a couple of hours. We would love to hear feedback and suggestions from curators in #curie!
We also intend to feature curated posts and authors, publishing statistics and lists on the frontend. Additionally, Daily Curie posts may continue on Steemit, but with payout declined, as long as there's demand for it. Ultimately, we hope to use the @curie account only for announcements and communication.
To begin with, we may need to scale down Curie's operations - curating much fewer posts - to stay within our budget. But we hope to see Steemit's Curation Guilds feature soon - that'll enable us to scale further as Steemit grows. Do note that the Curie frontend would be more about public submissions and verification - we'd still need the Curation Guilds feature.
Given our very limited budget, we don't have a timeline. We are currently at an early stage, and hope to kick start development in the coming weeks. During the development period, @curie's posts will no longer be 100% powered up.
Finally, the code for this frontend will be available for all curation guilds on the Steem network.
Backup witness @curie
Despite some technical gremlins and missed blocks during the initial testing period of v0.16.0 before the Hardfork, our witness nodes have been running seamlessly since Hardfork 16 four weeks ago. We do hope future versions of Steem will feature optimizations to control I/O usage, however, as currently it has to be run on either SSDs or shared RAM - both fairly expensive options for low ranked backup witnesses. This has led to discontinuing some nodes used for bots and scripts and merging with backup nodes.
As always, we continue to adjust all parameters manually and carefully, and are motivated by the interests of content creators. With the SBD now stable, we are preparing to follow fellow witnesses in reducing the interest rate to a long term rate in the ~3% range. We'll retain a very slight discount (~-1%) till the debt ratio is well under 2% for a sustained period. Account creation fee will be varied according to the general price trend of Steem.
Feel free to contact @liberosist or @kevinwong for witness related queries. We plan to make witness updates only when we have a major change to report in our approach.
Weekly Statistics
Over the last week, Project Curie curated a total of 494 posts at an average of 79 posts per day. A total of 337 unique authors were rewarded. The numbers are once again down, as expected for the Holidays. However, the decline is surprisingly mild - most Steemians continued posting through the holidays.
SBD 5,882 was generated at an average of SBD 12 per post. Once again, these numbers see a drop, also affected by a slightly lower price of Steem.
Authors
The Top 10 Authors by payouts last week were -
We have three authors repeating from last week - a record! Usually there are none or one. Besides that, we are seeing some fresh talent, but also some familiar names returning. Some of these authors will now be voted on by Steem Guild.
#curie @ https://steemit.chat/channel/curie
We upvoted 331 posts submitted by curators in #curie, with 2,593 STEEM paid out / pending payouts to curators. These numbers are higher than the previous week due to lower curation from the internal curators.
@alcibiades maintains top position this week, followed by @fubar-bdhr. @littlemozart continues in the top 3. At #4 we have a tie between @teofilex11 and a new challenger - @jewierart. #5 sees four curators tie - and there are a dozen more curators within striking distance of the Top 5. We have seen a strong "middle class" establish in #curie over the last couple of weeks.
We'd especially like to thank @fubar-bdhr for being the top curator from the very beginning. Who could forget his legendary 9 week winning streak! While @alcibiades joined us later, he has been just as much a crucial contributor to #curie.
- @alcibiades
- @fubar-bdhr
- @littlemozart
- @teofilex11 / @jewierart
- @masenjang / @olga-zlatan / @taktoys / @teukuderian
Note to finders: Finders not observing the submission guidelines will be disqualified
Join us in #curie on Steemit.chat, vote for @curie as witness and follow us @curie!
@curie Voted you for Witness
Thanks a lot for giving your great support to this steemit community!
Thanks a bunch to you all for your relentless dedication to our healthy high quality platform. All for one and one for all!! Namaste :)
I have voted for you as my witness. Thank you for your support @curie
Keep up the great work guys!
Thanks for the support Curie! It's because of your voting my account is growing more rapidly than I expected! I'll often make sure your posts are upvoted so you can continue supporting newbie accounts.
Symbolically flagged 1%. Reasons and discussion can be found as replies to previous posts on the @curie account
Aha. I was just wondering about this type of info. So is Curie a Guild or are the Guilds different things all together? Checking out them top authors now.
Yes, you could say Curie is a curation guild. There are others like Steem Guild, Robin Hood Whale and Steem Trail. Basically the objective is to find good posts and reward them, though the methods differ from guild to guild.
You did very great for me. Thank you very much.
Thank you so much @curie, "people help people"
Awesome project, thanks so much!