Curation. It's half the battle of Steemit.

_{Original image by Lisa Johnson @ www.techchef4u.com}

But what is Curating? Fact is, we all do it every day, to greater or lesser effect. Every time we give a post an upvote, we are telling the blockchain that this post has value to us. The more Voting Power we have, the more our Curation of the post moves the post up the list.

Recently, for @newsteem, I have been focusing on the people and groups who are out there fighting against the abuse of the reward pool. This is a noble calling, and I am glad there is someone out there fighting that fight! On the flip side, there are curation groups out there who are attempting to promote Steem Authors and Artists who are not getting the attention that their posts deserve. I thought it was time to highlight some of those who are working to highlight the people who are doing Steemit right!

There are a lot of different Curation efforts out there, and there is no way I can hit all of them, but I want to highlight some of the players that I am aware of.

In this post, we will look at three of the curation projects out there working to promote undervalued content. In the next post we'll look at some other individual efforts going on as well as at least one idea that I heard about over the weekend that may change the face of curation as we know it.

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Let's start with the biggest player in the curation game. If you see a vote from these guys, it's a very good day.

@CURIE

_{Image from @curie blog}

Curie is easily the largest guild of curators that I personally am aware of in the Steemit Platform.

Curie's Intro Post From 9 September, 2016 lays out the groundwork for what was to come. In that eary period, they managed the following:

Today's Brief Analysis
Over the last 24 hours, Project Curie voted on a total of 80 posts by 73 unique authors. Over these 80 posts, SBD 2665 were paid out to authors, for an average of SBD 33 per post. The top paying post was @milaoz's Ostrich Farm - Part 2. 13 of these posts were submitted in the #curie channel by curators. The top tags used were "art" (31), "story" (20) and "photography" (15). The tag "life" was used a lot, but often inappropriately so.

Moving forward to the latest weekly update posted 8 October 2017, Curie voted on 117 posts in the week, for an average of 17 posts a day.

Per Curie's 1st Year Update they have upvoted over 20,000 posts for 7500 unique authors, generating $700,000 in SBD payouts to authors.

The @curie account holds a SteemPower of almost 2.7 million. At 100% Sp and 100% Vp that would give Curie a vote of over $300. Of course, Curie is not throwing out 100% upvotes. In the small sampling of posts I opened, Curie upvoted between 17 and 20 percent voting weight, with vote valued of $43 to $56. These votes are accompanied by Curie's Curation Trail, including @hendrikdegrote who votes with the same vote weight as @curie, with vote values typically being a little more than half the value of @curie's vote. These two votes alone, give @curie curated posts a value between $70 and $100+. That's a really nice bump for Steemit Authors.

So what does it take to be found by Curie? Their guidelines change from time to time, but there are some key points that can be made.

You CANNOT Nominate Yourself. You cannot nominate your friend's post. You cannot nominate period. Curie maintains a roster of curators whose job is to sift through the new posts on Steemit and find the undervalued posts for recomendation. In Essense, to be found by Curie, don't seek to get found by Curie.

• Curie is focused on rewarding newer users, users with a reputation score between 25 and 52. This can be modified from time to time, and exceptions can be made for exceptional content, but for the most part, once you get past a reputation of 52, you are unlikely to see Curie again. Congrats on being an accepted member of Steemit who no longer needs Curie's boost.
• Posts must be at least 150 minutes old but less than 24 hours old, and have a payout value of less than $1.00.
• Authors are only eligible to be nominated once a week.
• Original content only (this should go without saying)
• No Steemit-related, religious, introduceyourself or political posts.
  _{Curation guidelines paraphrased from #curie channel of Steemit.chat}

Curie has a roster of curators who scour the platform for posts to nominate, they then post those for review by a panel who then decide if the post will be voted on or not. There is a system in place where Curators are judged based on the number of nominations submitted versus approved. There is some overall reward system for the top curators to strive for, but without getting too complex, we can say based on their steemit.chat guidelines is that each approved post earns the curator $20.

For further reading on Curie's guidelines, take a look at @liberosist's post Explaining Curie's Guidelines

Curie is currently the monster in the room of curation. There really isn't much in the way of comparison to them that I am aware of. Which is unfortunate, as with them cutting off those eligible for their vote at a 52 reputation (52.9 counts) it leaves authors sitting at a 53 reputation, and ineligible for Curie, but still definitely in the realm of the minnow.

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@OCD

_{Image From @ocd blog}

Operation Curation may be the second biggest impactor in the Curation game. To date they have released 95 Daily Curation Digests, as well as a new International Digest which just published it's 11th version.

OCD has about 31,000 SP, giving them a 100% VP, 100% weight vote of about $3.58. They appear to vote with 70-90% voting power on each post they are curating. But they do not appear to have a curation trail following them. The added value is inclusion in their daily Digest. Going through the top post in each of the last two weeks' digests it looks like the posts they curate end up around $20.00 payout. Again, based on the small sample size I looked at, the payout for these posts was significantly more than the author's typical post payout, so we'll assume this is the OCD effect.

Per the most recent OCD Weekly Update

OCD STATS

• Unique Authors Curated through Week 13: 604
• Total Curated Posts through Week 13: 744

You can read about how to get noticed by Operation Curation in @guyfawkes4-20's post how to get Curated by OCD

OCD's curators earn rewards based on their number of successful posts in a week. There is a table of all the curators and their earned rewards on the most current weekly update. In week 12, the payouts to Curators ranged from $5.00 to $175. There's also some kind of staking system that I didn't really delve into. But feel free to check it out, it is all right there in their update.

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The final group effort I want to touch on in this post is

@Buildawhale

_{Image from Buildawhale Blog. @nicnas}

Buildawhale has been doing curation for about two months now. You can check out their Intro Post. This intro post states the mission of the Curation Digest in this way:

What is concentrated curation?
Concentrated curation is the foundation of the curation efforts of @buildawhale. It involves a team of Curation Leaders who either by themselves or their own team of Steemians curate a set list of 15-20 posts.

_{quote paraphrased to remove reference to member of leadership team who is no longer part of the project}

The Chief curators for Buildawhale are @nicnas and @bethelea. It controls 219k SP, giving it a 100% upvote of $25.00. However, Buildawhale's function is not just curation, it is also a bid bot. So the majority of their Voting Power seems to be allocated to this purpose.

In fact, it seems like Curation is the secondary intent of the account, with This Post seeming to suggest that they are curating through the posts which had participated in the upvote bot voting process.

In scanning through the posts of the last few curation digests, I found that the buildawhale votes ranged from 1-14%, with values from $0.60 to $4.14. There does not seem to be a curation trail of voters coming behind the buildawhale vote, and these posts are rarely valued over $5.00 even after the curation. I did find three posts which had been curated by Buildawhale for which I could not locate a buildawhale vote.

So which comes first, the curation or the upvote? I'd be interested to see more information from the Buildawhale team about their curation efforts and whether they consider going after doing the manual curation and increasing the vote which the bid bot sent as a reward for their good content.

Another aspect of the Buildawhale offering is the opportunity to Sponsor a curation. By sending 3 STEEM to the Buildawhale account you can secure the top spot in their digest along with a curation comment from the curation team. This seems like a mixed bag since your 3 STEEM compels them to include the post, even if it is complete garbage. I'm not sure if they reserve the right to refund the sponsorship if the post does not meet certain standards.

Buildawhale is newer than the other two organizations on the curation effort, and may still be finding their feet on how best to operate their curation efforts. This is the one Curation effort where I have had interactions with the folks running it, and I do believe @nicnas and @bethelea are trying to put a great product together. So let's see what the future brings for this team. I am sure they are bound for big things!

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So there's part one of the Curators of Steemit. Getting noticed by these organizations can help your post make it to the trending category in no time.

In the follow up post I will be checking out some solo acts in the Curation Trail, including Upvotables by @jerrybanfield, A curation effort masked behind a contest by @kid4life, and Skillcoin, a new curation effort led by Steemit's Got Talent's @bambam808. So stay tuned for that one.

What am I missing? Are there other curation efforts out there that I need to acknowledge and touch on? Who do you look at as the big players in this realm? And how can the curation game be improved for everyone? Sound off in the comments below!

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Tools used in compiling this post:

• Hackmd Markdown Editor
• Steemit More Info - Chrome Extension
• Steemnow
• steemit.chat #curie channel

Links in this article:

• Curie Intro Post
• Curie's 1st Year Update
• Curie weekly update
• Explaining Curie's Guidelines
• OCD Daily Curation Digest Issue 95
• OCD International 11th edition
• OCD Weekly Update
• How to get Curated by OCD
• Buildawhale Intro Post
• Buildawhale Has ~$40 upvote and Human Curation

Thanks for checking out this post. Look for Part 2 coming out soon. And as always, your upvotes, resteems, and follows are greatly appreciated!