OCD Backstory

I will be writing down some of the plans and how we plan on implementing them into OCD in the next couple of days. Our future community and everything from curators to whitelisted users and to community members.

I believe on a platform such as Steem it is important to be transparent and public about the ins and outs, not doing so more times than not means that there is some activity going on behind the scenes that the majority of Steem users would not appreciate.

First of, beginning with how things used to work on OCD and how we became such a big curation project, a bit of history about it in this post:

It started off with me finding 10 curators that would receive a delegation of 1000 Steem to help me find deserving and undervalued new and old users on the platform. Back then this was a one time thing although at times repetitive curation of the same users did occur. The response for Steemians wanting to curate was overwhelming and instead of picking 10 I went for 20.

Since then we have improved and adjusted a lot, the way we curate posts and authors, the effectiveness of sharing their posts to our followers and the extra incentive for curators to do a good job at it. Early on there was a lot of controversy about the extra incentive for curators but I believe over time it became more obvious that the 20-25% curation rewards were not enough. A few months ago the curation curve was still a big ongoing debate.

People have asked me why I started this curation project or put in another way "what's in it for you?". Early on a big percentage of my daily voting power was going towards OCD, not only was it being used actively and I couldn't spare much voting power towards myself or other projects/users that could've used it, but it was also costing me curation rewards as we attempted to incentivise other manual curators to front run us. For a while I was receiving 25% (half the SP) of the post rewards from the OCD daily compilation posts to make up for the difference. At one point I removed the delegation to all curators and also the 25% of post rewards and settled for the curation rewards of @ocd which at the time did not have a lot of delegation. We started curating different languages as well, added more curators that could read both english and their native language and after the SBD and Steem spike we decided to create our own witness account (a bit late but we wanted to show our longetivity and support of the platform and currency).

More recently after the pump and the long dump we noticed users leaving, going inactive, getting sloppy, etc. We introduced a stake system where your activity as a curator or plagiarism checker was also being rewarded from the SP the posts generated. This was a great system but also naturally required someone to keep track of everything.

All in all after about 1.5 years of activity and some breaks @ocd has posted 178 issues of 5-10 curated International posts and 284 issues of 5-10 curated english posts. We went back to check all users we have carefully curated in the past and added them to a whitelist of over 3000 users today who could continuously grow their accounts by bidding Steem for votes of a non-profit bid/distribution bot. Of course at a time like this it also means that many of those users are gone and won't return for a while but moving forward all new users will be more aware of their perks after having been curated by us.

This creates a healthy model where curators manually curate new authors, get a reward for finding them and add them to the whitelist so those authors can grow faster if they so choose to. This is mainly being done for a healthy distribution as that is one of the main strengths of a delegated proof of stake. Of course our requirements to be added to it won't be too strict as we don't want to unfairly exclude anyone from being able to join or upgrade their content for it.

Today there are maybe two handful of curators still active and awaiting the next phase for OCD and in the coming days I will be posting about it and discussing it with everyone here. Feel free to leave feedback so we can turn this community curation project into one of the best ones out there that will exist for a very long time.

Thank you to everyone reading and everyone who has been part of this amazing journey for OCD. It really means a lot seeing how accepting the users were of our distribution bot considering many, us included did not like what bid bots did and refrained from using or delegating to them for the longest time. Thank you also to all the amazing curators, some who have stuck around from the very beginning and have worked very hard to improve the platform and its posts.

In the end the true altrustic and healthy projects will make it out on top and I am glad we have so many users here on Steem today who are in it for the long haul and want what's best for the platform. Thank you, again.

:)