Hi @suematters, Check out the Curie Whitepaper which should help to explain what it is all about. https://steemit.com/curation/@curie/curie-whitepaper

Basically though, Curie is a guild whose goal it is to find exceptional content and authors who might otherwise go unnoticed. To do this there are curators who search day and night for these great quality posts and authors. Once we find one we submit it, the content is then reviewed by another team and if accepted it will get an upvote from Curie and its curation trail which results in a substantial overall upvote.