My Curation Hall of Fame!

15 Steem Power in 3 Likes

When I first joined Steem, I thought the "get paid to like content" idea couldn't be real. I was skeptical all around. Putting a $ next to a number doesn't mean it'll pay down my mortgage. Then I read the white paper, lost a week of my life, and there's no turning back now. I'm hooked.

That said, I still wasn't convinced the curation rewards would ever amount to much. I was seeing 0.001, 0.003, etc. Later I learned the algorithm is tweaked a bit to discourage bots from voting up content before humans can actually read it. It's weighted in such a way as to reward the author instead of the curator in the first 30 minutes, on a sliding scale. The idea being, as a curator, you should be rewarded for finding good (often older) content which would otherwise be missed. Also, the more Steem Power you have, the more influence you have, so quite a bit changed once I invested some bitcoin into my account. Try not to compare the results of your likes with the results of others who different Steem Power than you.

In the last day or two, I'm now a curator believer. I'm putting this under the #journal category, because I want to remember this as being week one of my Steemit journey. I have so many hopes and expectations for this platform. I think history is being made here, so I want to keep a record of it on the blockchain.

So, without further ado, here's my curation reward hall of fame. 15 Steem Power in one day with just three likes:

8 hours ago curation reward of 3.013 STEEM POWER for roelandp/steemstream-com-a-realtime-visualisation-of-all-activity-on-steemit
18 hours ago curation reward of 2.948 STEEM POWER for liondani/it-s-official-females-dominates-males-on-steemit
24 hours ago curation reward of 9.047 STEEM POWER for karen13/a-lion-a-shark-and-a-girl-on-the-beach

That's some real Steem Power!

For the curious, here's what (I think) I did to earn those rewards:

1. Hang out in the Slack channel. People are constantly posting links in #postpromotion to great content which is under appreciated or soon to be massively voted up.
2. Head to the new posts feed, scroll down to around 20 to 30 minutes, and scan headlines for something that interests you.
3. READ THE ARTICLE. Don't bother upvoting something you don't personally care about because groupthink helps no one.
4. Think about what the community wants, needs, and will get excited about that aligns with what you like. This, to me, is a great example: https://steemit.com/steem/@roelandp/steemstream-com-a-realtime-visualisation-of-all-activity-on-steemit with a $4,356.06 payout!
5. Since this is an article you personally care about, add a meaningful comment. The active feed is another way for this great content to get noticed and voted up. You might also create some new relationships.
6. Every once in a while, change "steemit.com" in the URL of a post you're looking at to "steemd.com" and then click the "Vote Details" link to better understand how the voting distribution works:

So there you go, that's my curation hall of fame for my first week of Steemit.

For fun and historical journaling purposes (and because I have no idea how this thing will play out long term), here's a shot of my wallet as of 7.15.2016 with the volatile price around $3.70:

Are you adding your own #journal entries to the blockchain too? If so, let me know.