My Weird Ethical Considerations while Curating

When I introduced #fknmayhem-tumbls around a week ago, I explained the concept of the advanced form of resteem with added commentary.

This is an old form of curation and one which has been popular since long before Facebook Shares, Retweets (or quoted tweets), and many other principles. For online publishers, the topical selection has traditionally been part of their brand but there’s another interesting detail, an additional incentive, to it as well: page views.

Of course, most do curate first and foremost because they love sharing the awesome stuff they discover.

Considering that this practice has started long before social networks became popular, and even before RSS was the default method for nerds common, it was also a rather simple way to accumulate additional page views and thus improve the revenue via advertising.

Photo by Benjamin Davies on Unsplash

Back in those earlier years page views, and not CPC, were still an important metric when selling ads slots. A prolific curator would regularly be visited, often multiple times a day even. That each of these asides, as WordPress calls that content type, were monetisable was normal and never led to any debate.

Here on Steem things are slightly different though.

Community Decided Value

A core concept of the Steem platform is that the community decides the worth of content created by means of financial upvotes, or also using financially penalising downvotes. A whale can easily decide that a post has received too many rewards and correct that, also in order to return distributed rewards to the rewards pool and thus made available to other creators.

Not too long after I started my curation efforts, I immediately started wondering what the real value of a curated post is. Is there any value t them, and if so what is reasonable a reward.

While on most posts I add at least one paragraph of commentary, sometimes even three or four, the reality is that without discovering the original content, there would be no post at all. Because no content, no curation, right?

What is Discovery Worth?

Because I curate on an alt account (@dashroom), I add a footer to each post in an attempt t explain what the alt is about. Currently the footer sports following:

Once Steemit has an option to integrate beneficiaries when posting, 50% of each curated post’s rewards will go to the original content creator.

I know that can easily be done via steemwhales.com already, then again nothing is easy on steemwhales.com. I don’t even want to consider using the site daily, let alone multiple times a day. Sadly enough, so far no other popular app to the Steem blockchain has the beneficiary feature integrated in its UI.

Donating 50% of each posts rewards would result in 25% of all rewards for me, if we stick with de facto 25% going to the curators.

Now, I’m under no illusion and don’t expect that alt to make any SBD/STEEM whatsoever, or at least not a lot. I also know that given that I most often add additional commentary nobody will expect me to share the revenues with the original post creator. But ethically
weirdly wired as I am, it is one of those things which keeps my mind active.

What do you think, Steemians? Would you share with the original content or not? And if you would, how much would you share?

_{Hi there, you’re reading this on my main account, @FknMayhem.}

_{I also tumbl awesome content I find across the Steem ecosystem, and sometimes not on a Blockchain [gasp!]based sites, from my alt account @dashroom, AKA FknMayhem².}

_{If you wish to keep updated with those discoveries, don’t hesitate to follow me over there. I think you may like it if you love Steem and thought-provoking reads. Be warned though, there may be days on which It Might Get Loud.}

_{I am also on zeh Titter. Feel free to pitch me your worthy suggestions there. But make them worth my time, please.}