REQUEST: Jointly Create a TOOL to Support MANUAL CURATION
Since some time I'm actively curating music related posts within our Steem/Steemit community. The idea behind this curation is that the best posts of the day get a powerful upvote from us. The challenge that we are facing in our team, is the time required to find the best posts of the day. We simply don't have a good tool to support our curation work! Not only we have issues with this, but I hear the same from other manual curators, from curator teams to individuals.
In this post I'll address following topics:
- Curation Tool: Much Needed!
- Request to You: Building a Tool Together
- High Level Scope
- Compensation
- Interested? Come Forward!
- Looking Forward to Your Participation!
Curation Tool: Much Needed!
To support manual curation, by curation teams, but also by those individuals who like to manual curate; I would like us, the community, to create a tool that has the aim to support the active curator.
The main purpose of such curation tool is to be able to filter out all those posts that are not relevant for curation.
Some of the features we already have in interfaces like those provided by Steemit, Busy.org and others, such like tags, but they are not necessarily implemented in a way it is optimised for manual curators. When I like to go through eg 10 tags, I cannot get all posts with one or more of these tags in a single view, a single list. I need to go manually to all these 10 tags, and I may view the same posts under the various tags.
Other features like filtering based on Reputation, Post age, Pending rewards and more are completely missing as functionalities, but are very relevant when curating with the aim to support those posts that are undervalued and have a certain quality.
Request to You: Building a Tool Together
Unfortunately I'm far from being an software developer, but I'm a proposition and product manager by nature and have a lots of experience (15 yr+) in these fields.
I'm looking for software developers who like to participate in creating the much needed tool for all those who want to manually curate!
Others who like to contribute to such tool, Let me know as well; There is always room for more none developers in the team to get this job done!
My idea is to create an open source tool and offered this entirely for free to the community (see also "Compensation" chapter further down in this post).
High Level Scope
To give you an idea of what I think is very useful, I list some of the key features for the tool:
- Creation of Multiple channels based on Filters, Black/Whitelists
- Filters
- Tags
- Post Age
- Post Content
- includes text
- minimum amount of words
- includes media types
- includes x external links
- Keywords
- Post Frequency
- Pending Post Rewards
- Plagiarism detection
- Authors Reputation
- Blacklists/Whitelists
- Author
- Keywords: subject/body
In addition, such tool needs to have:
- Extremely user friendly User Interface
- Fast response times on filtered channels
Note: I do realise some of the mentioned features may not so easy to implement, especially when fast response times are required. This may require a local store of the entire Steem blockchain, and pre-processing of all the data on the blockchain. If this means a witness node is required, we shall consider this. Either create a new witness, or work together with existing witnesses and possibly others in the community who create their 'local' Steem copies.
Note: I'll be creating a requirements document based on above listed features, and feedback I'm receiving from those who agree to participate in this project as well as from the Steemit community at large. Anything that requires specialist knowledge, like maybe to create a super simple User Interface, I'll be hunting for users who like to support.
Compensation
I realise we all need to pay our bills, therefore we cannot work free-of-charge all the time. For that reason, I'm looking into ways to compensate at least some of our time spend. When a baseline tool is available, various ways to get some revenues are considered, such as through posts (dedicate account; Utopian etc). In addition, I'm reaching out to manual curators (individuals and teams) to get their support as well. When we are able to create something valuable, I'll be reaching out to powerful users in our community and will also seek contribution by Steemit Inc.
I'm a senior Java developer, and I've been thinking about developing something to allow for better content discovery. There seems to be some overlap between the two.
You have a long list of features there, what would be the minimum features you need to make this an effective curation tool?
Yesss! I knew sending this to you was a good idea!!!!!
Thanks!
Need to think about what would be the minimum. Ultimately all would be great, but I need understand what is involved to create it, since I think some local Steem DB is required, especially when keywords are getting into the action. But I would like to be able to filter on post age, rep, combination of tags, post rewards and all of this freely configurable per channel. On top of that author blacklist, easy configurable and extendible. What would help greatly is the minimum word count, but this could be a later deliverable or something. Shall we have a discussion on Discord?
EDIT: I think most of the filter items are parameters relatively easy to be extracted from post, the keywords, plagiarism detection becomes more complicated (grammarly maybe something to integrate). So I suppose each post published onto the Steem blockchain is to be post-processed and relevant parameters are recorded in the services DB. This is then the DB to be queried. When we would like to have this tool available for the entire community, such DB may need to be running a some super server, when we think in phase 1 to give this tool to some of the curators out their, then the backend server can be quite a bit smaller I would think. To bring the tool offline, to the desktop, I suppose this requires more code, since their are more platform out there, and is is maybe not as simple as a centralised server + web user interface.
Count me in. I have my own python script to do something similar. If you ever start this project, it would be my pleasure to contribute. In fact I am eager to apply the little tricks, I learned by playing around with the Steemit API, last few weeks.
More than that, I feel if, manual curators are not provided with good enough tools, Steemit will spiral down to a playground for bots (it is a nice place for bots though!)
Adding more, the following can be a broad and scalable outline from the user experience perspective.
Each user can open a 'perspective' of his choice, from a number of inbuilt and custom 'perspectives'.
Each perspective consists a combination of filters.
The user should be able to add or remove filters, on each perspective
The user should be able to set or adjust the parameters for each filter.
When a user opens a perspective, he will see only the posts, that can get through the filters included in that perspective.
If we choose a name for the project we can start a project on GitHub and move the discussion in there. (Guessing you meant an open-source project)
Thank you so much; Are you on Discord? When so, whats your username over there?
febinkk#9220
Cant find it: mine is edje#3711
So so so glad to read this!!!!
i can not develop anything but fully support your request my friend!
Cool thanks! :)
Can’t believe how much „Crap“ Is trending. It’s been really hard to curate manually. I stopped my autovoter and it’s nearly impossible to make enough. I hope my resteeming effort will help a little bit.
Thanks so much for your support. Am reaching out on many channels, including witness channels on Steemit.Chat. Some users already promised me to show my post to developers they know.
That’s good to hear because we really need more support for manual curation
Thanks! Lets see, so far some response from none technical people, but generally stating: the engineers I know, will not develop when not getting paid by the hour. My search continues :)
I also would need a tool to unfollow members who are not active. It’s a nightmare to scroll through every single one and check. My feed is clogged up that I can’t find my favourite authors anymore.
I agree. For some people, only 1 post is needed to make it to the trending page day after day. Even if they repeat themselves! Sometimes I wonder why these posts get trending every time. It makes no sense to me and I can't figure out why. I think it is a great thing, in my opinion, you stopped autovoting.
True, there's so much noise on the trending section. Do we know how posts get there?
Circle jerks or people who have powerful voter friends.
12 views is maybe due to the fact that, at this moment, there are many 'pingers' ... they come, ping their content and go .. and they follow others in the hole of being followed ... (not because they like the content) .. this is (almost) a generation thing ...
Most people don't look into their HOME channel, or their HOME channel is clogged with too many posts since many Steemians follow hundreds to thousands of Steemians :) or better said :(
My home channel is a big mess but it’s too time consuming to sort it out.
Correct, and it is quite blunt to unfollow users, and beside that even more important a user you follow can post great posts and also not so great posts, or on multiple topics of which you maybe interested only in a subset of the topics. The MUTE button is to harsh IMHO and will exclude users from being detected at any time in the future. Hence, we need personalised filtering capabilities. When not provided by the main Steem blockchain interfaces, then as a separate tool; At least that is my opinion :)
This is also my opinion. I unfollowed some but feel bad. The same way I feel bad when I find somebody who unfollows me. Anyways we need MORE helpful tools as you wrote in your previous post.
It's not. We, curators, adjust. I strongly recommend you try and get this done through @utopian-io . All the good developers are there, and the platform rewards them for their efforts.
I would love to use Utopian, but unless I'm mistaken, when I launch a new project on Github, I'm required to have CODE in it to be considered by Utopian. Even when it concerns a BLOG, SUGGESTION or even TASK REQUEST contribution. So, please give me hints how I can get Utopian support without having CODE for this project I'm proposing.
I am still learning myself. I am not a programmer but a content writer and marketer. So I plan to help utopian bridge the gap between people with ideas and open source developers. Until I figure it all out, I recommend you pop over to the utopian discord and simply ASK. Alternatively, I'll send it to one of my significant others and ask if he wants to code it. Or start to.
Are we talking about a website or a browser plug-in? Because there is Steemit Plus (I think) that attempts to offer some filtering options on steemit, but it's pretty buggy.
The tool needs to be very efficient and needs to perform while it needs to search and filter a large database (the Steem blockchain). I think the tool will need to have a witness node, to have local copy of Steem blockchain + backend processing + frontend. The frontend can be anything, eg webservices, or desktop tool. My preference is a desktop tool with local Steem blockchain as an option so curators can take their laptop offline and still curate. But that will require a lot of resources in terms of HDD, but it will limit the amount of resources required serverside. All that said, I'm a product manager and know what it means to develop high performant software tools, but I'm not an software architect/developer at all, so I will have to leave it with those who are experts in creating fast/reliable software tools.
I think you really should ask the guys at utopian how to make this happen. Because I need a tool like that in my life.
Utopian don't take requests .. they take already-developed-tools ... there are parts where contacts may be established though ...
I thought so indeed, but still, left a message in the general HELP section of Utopian at Discord.
Thanks :)
Yes! We need such tool to beat Autovoters and find good content. Too many great new authors vanish too fast otherwise.
In the meatime @edje
I suggest you use a bit of SQL.
It's honestly not too tricky to get a query that could do most of the above. @curie curators use something similar :)
If you are on discord, i can get you some links/examples and guide you through it?
Thanks. I'm on Discord indeed.
I would like to help, if I can ... I am not a developer, have basic knowledge of coding, am willing to invest time on your project ...
Cool. You can private message me, and will take it from there.
I wish I was a software developer so I could help :( I would love a filter tool like the one you've outlined. It would be so helpful.
Any non technical support is also appreciated :) Thanks for your support.
Helpful most important article.
Thanks For Sharing
@edje
Thank you.
This post is very important for know about to you.
thanks
i like it
You're Welcome and thanks for your support.
I can't develop myself but I think it is a great idea.
Thank you
Very informative post!
Thanks :)