Zorker's Steemit Lessons: Getting @Curie's Attention

Source: Pixabay

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There are lots of little things you can do to optimize and maximize your returns here on Steemit. Earlier this month I wrote a piece describing nine simple tips and suggestions for people looking to play the long game and build gradually. If you're unfamiliar with @minnowsmith or @steembasicincome, take a minute to click on that link and get on the road to automating small growth. Look into the @dustweeper program while you're at it too, it's a great and inexpensive way to ensure both you and your readers are getting the full value of your curation efforts.

There's one important thing I didn't mention in that post, and that's because it deserves its own stand-alone piece. You've likely seen their name pop up if you've been reading articles here for any length of time. Maybe you've been fortunate enough to get seen by them and benefit from their efforts, and if so, you likely felt relieved because finally all your work was paying off. Maybe you've seen them hit other peoples' content and wondered how you get yourself on their radar. Having been the recipient of their generosity and community-building service over a dozen times at this point, I can't guarantee everyone who reads this and adopts these methods will profit, and I can't promise you the same success I've had. What I can promise is my interpretation of how I've attracted @curie's attention on the average of 2-3 times per month by analyzing what those posts have in common. With any luck, you too can profit from my hard work.

This is the Zork-meister's guide to getting @curie's attention.

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What is @Curie?

If you're new to the platform, or never encountered her yet, @curie is a dedicated curation service for the Steemit blockchain. Unlike autovoters such as @steembasicincome and @qurator, or voting bots like @minnowbooster and @randowhale, @curie neither requires investment from a user nor can you purchase her affection. You don't need to follow her, send SBD, delegate Steem Power, or invoke her name in the comments section of your blog.

Much like Chuck Norris, you don't find @curie--she finds you.

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How does @Curie work?

Basically, @curie runs off the dedication of a hard-working team of curators who have attached themselves to the project. These curators constantly browse the platform in search of content they deem interesting, exciting, unique, relevant, and worthy of reward. When they find an article they feel should be considered by the group at large, they submit it for approval by the rest of the team. If, after investigation, enough people on the team agree it's worth curating, they then decide an appropriate upvote percentage to reward the author, and @curie makes the initial strike.

In the aftermath of @curie's vote, you see a veritable orgy of upvotes from those users who have joined @curie's curation trail. These accounts generally shift their votes to match @curie's, so if she gives out a 5.8% upvote, you'll see a slew of other 5.8% upvotes. Using SteemWorld you can easily track vote percentages if you're curious to see exactly who voted what.

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So @Curie makes you rich?

Not exactly, but she certainly helps. Remember the @curie community not only decides whether your content is worth upvoting, but also how much of an upvote it's worth.

Here are two different posts I've made in the past few months which got @curie's stamp of approval:

Top Three Desert Island Video Games - 73 upvotes, $4.55 payout.

The Six Best Classic Gen 13 Story Lines of All Time - 438 upvotes, $121.37 payout.

Why the massive difference? Well besides the variations in Steem's median value and the larger number of upvotes for the Gen 13 article, the main reason comes down to @curie's initial upvote. In the first example, @curie rated my post as worth of a 2.1% upvote. The second example, on the other hand, saw a @curie drop a 30% upvote. The trail follows @curie's assessment, and votes accordingly, and many on the trail don't have enough Steem Power to make such a tiny upvote worth anything. When this happens they don't upvote, so you aren't missing out on any actual reward, and they aren't wasting their voting power.

At the time those articles got their @curie votes, a 2.1% vote from @curie was worth ~$0.28. A 30% @curie upvote, on the other hand, was worth a whopping $8.40. Bigger @curie votes = larger article payout. Simple economics.

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That's all well and good, but what does @Curie actually like?

Obviously I can't speak for everyone on the team because I'm not a part of it and am not privy to their discussions when it comes to article nominations and the peer review process, but there's one thing above all @curie seems to value, and that's hard work.

Every piece I've received @curie upvotes on has been long-form prose, and they all share similar qualities.

First, although this might be obvious to most, I'll point it out anyway: nothing I've written that received a @curie nod is plagiarized or borrowed from other sources. Some of the things I've posted to Steemit have been posted previously elsewhere (the Desert Island Games piece, for instance, first appeared at Retro Gaming Magazine), but if you steal other people's work and claim it as your own, or post your own work but don't properly source it from the site where it originated, @curie not only won't be interested in your stuff but you may end up on a blacklist from not only them but other curation guilds. Always, always, always source your materials, even if you wrote them yourself.

Second, you'll rarely find @curie upvoting short or minimalist works. If you want her to notice you, then memes, single pictures with minimal commentary, video links, and other things that obviously didn't take much time for the user to create for Steemit aren't the way to go. The good news is that, per their white paper, @curie maintains an active presence in a lot of the artistic tags here, so things like poetry, art, and fiction are all potential candidates for curation.

Third, @curie loves a personal touch. Every last thing of mine selected for @curie curation has not just been long-form prose, but it told some kind of story unique to me. That Desert Island Game list? Nobody else but me would have the same Top 3 in that category. My favorite Gen 13 comics? Again, my personal choice--everybody else's would be different. The list goes on:

• Tom and the Cow is a humorous anecdotal memorial to an old friend from high school who passed away in February.

• Michael's Horror Lase-O-Rama: Leviathan is not just a review of the movie, but my personal experience of watching it for the first time on laserdisc and an exploration of how the underwater shots were accomplished with such a low budget, which required additional research about the film's production before I could even start writing.

• Under Siege, Send Help! -- Tips For Defending Your Awesome Stronghold in D&D is my personal summation of accumulated knowledge through several decades of role playing about low-cost and imaginative ways you can stave off and thwart an invading force intent on taking over your castle.

The connecting line these all have is a personal touch. Journalism teaches writers to put themselves in a reader's shoes and ask the six important questions of who, what, where, when, why, and how. If you approach your own writing with at least a nod to most of these questions, the end result of your article will have not only your own personal touch, but expanded interest for readers.

Think of it this way: it's easy for someone to take a picture and post it here with a sentence that says, "Good morning Steemit. Here's my dog."

These are not my wolves, and it's not my back yard, but bear with me here.

Now it's not every day you get to see someone sitting on a milk crate in a fenced-in pen with real live wolves, especially someone as devastatingly handsome as myself (Ladies!), but be honest: that's boring. It's interesting for the ten seconds it took for you to scan the picture and realize I didn't have on any underwear (Ladies!, @blewitt!), but you can go on with your day without considering just how close to death I was (those were puppies, so not very) at all times in that paddock. And if it's true for you, it's true for @curie. Uninteresting = uninterested.

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I Wrote a Really Interesting Post and Didn't Get a @Curie Upvote! WTF!

Here's the thing--@curie's under no obligation to upvote you or anybody else, and putting in a shit-ton of work doesn't mean you've earned her services. Not even for me. Witness:

Michael's Long Box: Razor's Chronology (Is Ridiculously Complicated) was a long-ass post about comic books that required an absurd amount of prep work and digging through my collection to try and piece together. I'm not even sure I got everything right, but I did the best I could. The prep time for even writing that article was weeks as I collated issues, read through them, and tried to make sense of the general hash of the timeline for a 90's bad girl book nobody but me probably remembers or even cares about. Its final payout: $1.61 from 37 upvotes.

Ouch.

So, what happened?

Could have been anything. Maybe the @curie curator or reviewer who stalks #comics was on vacation or sick. Maybe someone submitted it and the community decided it wasn't worthy of consideration--it was too hyper-focused on something too few people cared about. Maybe it just got overlooked. Maybe a potential curator looked at it but decided somebody else wrote something better and selected that instead. I have no idea, and I never will.

But that's not the point. The point is, the posts where I don't put in the hard work? Those are guaranteed to never get noticed by the @curie community. The only thing that gets results where @curie is concerned is dedication. Maybe once you get noticed the first time you wind up on their radar, and that impacts your potential for future curation opportunities, but I see too many people whining about how @curie never notices them and not enough users actively putting in the screen time with their posts to make something worthy of @curie's attention.

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That's the bottom line: @curie wants to reward hard work and under-valued content. If you do get 'Curied', take note of what made that post stand out compared to your other work and strive to do something similar the next time. If it doesn't work, try again the next time. You can't get noticed if you don't do the work, so don't give up! The upvotes are out there if you're willing to work for them. And trust me, that feeling when you see a ridiculous number of votes on your work is better than any other high in the world. Get addicted to it and it makes you a better Steemizen by default.

Now get out there and kick some more ass!