Curation Rewards - for the Wealthy, Lucky or Bored ...
I've been learning more about Steem and lately trying to understand and figure out curation through experimentation, trial and error. From day one here on Steemit I have been upvoting posts and comments that I've found interesting, or that I find interesting and are pretty popular. Now originally, like most newcomers, I was upvoting to my hearts content until I learned more about voting power and that power decreases as you continue upvoting. The current recommendation that I understand as best practice is that you should vote approximately 12 times per day so that by the next day your voting power has fully regenerated to near 100%.
At this point, I have yet to break anything over a .02 SP curation reward which amounts to a few cents. A majority of my curation rewards are in the .001 - .005 range. So in evaluating my curation history, I currently have the ability to make a few cents maximum about 12 times per day with the recommended voting pattern.
There are 3 potential ways to curate significantly
BE WEALTHY - Have a significant amount of SP (delegated or owned). We're talking more than $20,000 worth of SP to move the needle of curation rewards. We all understand that with investment in Steem comes power to assign value to authors' content and in return earn curation rewards if that content strikes a chord with the community. You'll need to buy in with a large investment in SP or you'll need to spend money on renting delegated SP.
I have browsed through a handful of profiles to view their curation rewards and having less than $10,000 in SP won't get you very far if you are curating other peoples content. To really earn anything serious for curation you need to have > $20,000.
BE LUCKY - If you don't have $20,000 or more in SP, you're going to have to get really lucky to earn anything more than cents or fractions of cents on the platform. The only way you'll likely earn anything worthwhile will be to sneak in a vote on a post or comment before a whale gets their vote in. With all the curation trails and auto upvoting that's possible, that is going to be really tough to do. Which leads me to my last method...
BE A BABYSITTER - Having an insignificant amount of SP means you will need to get pretty lucky to earn something decent on a curated piece of content. To get lucky you need to beat a whale, or the crowds, to get ahead of the curation rewards curve. The only way to do that is going to babysit the New pages and scour for good content or good authors and try to sneak in your upvote fast. Not too fast though or you end up giving significant amount of your rewards back to the author in the reverse auction.
There really is only one true method.
Out of the 3 methods above, the only real way to earn decent curation rewards is to invest heavily in SP. Because the entry fee for good curation rewards is $20k+ that is going to be left to the very few on the platform who have access to that kind of money to invest.
Using a quick search on SteemWhales we find that about 750 accounts have $20k or more in account value (not necessarily SP). There are 250,000 registered account as of the writing of this article. Doing the math that means .3% (note that's not 3%) of accounts are making decent earnings for curating content. There will be a few oddballs who earned something decent by getting lucky ... lottery kind of lucky.
What is the attraction here?
Let's face it, the #1 selling point for Steem is that you can earn money doing the things you do on Facebook, Twitter, [insert other social network here].
Steem is a blockchain-based social media platform where anyone can earn rewards
This is the main headline on Steem.io, earning is the core selling point. Why else would anyone abandon their social network of choice to come over here where likely none of their network even exists yet.
Curation is touted as one of the 2 ways someone can earn on this platform, the other being getting your own content curated. But at the $20k buy-in price to make curation worthwhile, it really isn't accessible but to a fraction of a percent of the entire community.
It makes me wonder if I should just start upvoting my own content.
I could earn significantly more by just upvoting all my own comments 12 times a day.
(I know that's not the right mindset or spirit of the platform, but it is reality that a whole lot of new users will have when they realize that earning without considerable investment is pretty hard. Not just a handful of new users too ... millions of them as discussed with Hardfork 0.20.0 'Velocity'
This is a pretty good analysis of curation rewards. My question is whether financial rewards is the crux of Steemit.
I reckon that Steemit is first a social media platform, and our use of social media is proven to be desirable absent emuneration.
When Steemit adds rewards to the platform, it has not become worse than those that do not reward creators and curators. Focusing merely on rewards creates of Steemit something it is not: a job.
Not that it can't be, given time and development. I know of several people that claim to have never invested a satoshi in SP, yet also to have surpasses the 20k SP you note is the threshold for nominal earnings for curation.
So your analysis is appropriate caution to consider Steemit not primarily an income generating proposal, but rather social media, and a way to share posts with folks you like.
How we look at something can dramatically alter what we think it is.
I would absolutely agree with your thoughts. But tell me this, for the average person coming from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, what is it that will actually make them switch? Rewards.
I don't see any promotional material going out touting privacy, or decentralization or anything else remotely substantial. And for a mainstream audience they won't care to jump ship from their current social media to Steemit for any of those reasons anyways.
So, the main differentiator here is rewards. It's undeniable that rewards are the truly interesting proposition to 95% of the people it will take to get Steem to 10 million users.
How do they earn rewards? Articles and Curation. And right now both favor those with significant Steem Power invested which doesn't favor those switching platforms. If they don't immediately make some sort of noticeable reward, they will bail within a week. When they do, those users will lose/forget their password and keys and this will be a ghost town of account names and a some really passionate crypto enthusiasts who reward each other.
I would absolutely agree with your thoughts. But tell me this, for the average person coming from Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or Reddit, what is it that will actually make them switch? Rewards.
I don't see any promotional material going out touting privacy, or decentralization or anything else remotely substantial. And for a mainstream audience they won't care to jump ship from their current social media to Steemit for any of those reasons anyways.
So, the main differentiator here is rewards. It's undeniable that rewards are the truly interesting proposition to 95% of the people it will take to get Steem to 10 million users.
How do they earn rewards? Articles and Curation. And right now both favor those with significant Steem Power invested which doesn't favor those switching platforms. If they don't immediately make some sort of noticeable reward, they will bail within a week. When they do, those users will lose/forget their password and keys and this will be a ghost town of account names and a some really passionate crypto enthusiasts who reward each other.
Well, there may be folks, like myself that despise the censorship, data harvesting, and forcefed propaganda on Fakebook. This is what I would emphasize in marketing, while retaining mention of rewards.
However, it is the rewards that will prove out Steemit, in time.
It is that time is of the essence that causes folks to bail when their expectations aren't met. It is therefore critical to limit expectations in order to retain active accounts.
@diabolika has recently posted that there is an active recruitment initiative that seeks out good writers, drops a few reward bombs on them early on, and then regards them as hooked.
This works, but creates great frustration, and I reckon still ultimately fails more than it works. Worse, it creates false expectations. People have quit jobs, moved into vans, and tried to make a living on Steemit because of early boosts.
It is writing like yours, and lucidity that I came here for, and I have not been disappointed. I reckon rewards need to be merely the icing on the cake, to preclude backlash.
The real draw of Steemit is free speech, and, presently at least, the lack of propaganda.
I find this trend of upvoting one's own comments to be really a cop-out. I've been here nearly a year and have put my time in and earned over 20K steem power, I didnt invest anything but tons and tons of time creating really good posts and commiting to others who are really talented and commenting on their work and developing relationships here. This is not an easy money gig, one has to put time and effort and commitment in!!
Absolutely! You've been through a ton of change during that time from my understanding. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the next HF20 is aimed at onboarding millions of new users, or making that feasible. And the selling point is to bring them over is the ability to earn. I see many people not sticking it out for the long term like you have because they were sold on earning yet for the massive majority of users here that will be really hard. They'll just abandon ship to their old networks.
Curation is being sold as a method to earn but it's not accessible to any newcomer unless they buy heavily into the platform upfront. What will they end up doing? Self upvoting ... it's a logical progression for people to make when they realize other methods for earning are inaccessible or hard.
I never really understood how Resteeming worked. I should not resteem as much as its pointless till i get more steem power. Nice post, really usful to me and I bet others too.
Resteeming won't do anything to earn curation rewards unless you've added an upvote prior to resteeming. The upvote is what marks you for curation rewards, resteeming is just letting others know about the content so they can upvote if they want. Resteeming is also only worthwhile if you have a good active follower base which I find is really hard to accomplish ... I'll leave that for another post sometime. Thanks for the comment!
I agree with your comments. It also makes no sense (to me anyway) how SP can be created from nothing. Content for content's sake isn't creating value or helping to monetise the value of the footfall through the site. As much as I like Steemit, it is doomed to fail.
I did a piece on curation a week or so ago with similar first point conclusions!
Just read through, much better research driven post that gets across the same point ... to make anything decent you need $$SP. I'd upvote ya, but it's past payout :) I'll follow instead. Thanks for the comment
Yep it's all about the SP!
Cheers. Must get round to a post this week then!
I believe of working our way up with proper network (getting to know good steemians here) and little by little investment is good. Not everyone has the money they can invest and be ready to lose it; because all investments have risks, and not everyone can afford to lose the scrapes they have just yet.
Interesting article though. This actually explains why my votes are still pretty weak. I guess I might need to really pick and choose the best 12 posts I like over the day, maybe resteem them first and spread out the voting throughout the day to get a steady return of voting power, and also able to contribute (with curator rewards returned later)
Ahhh haaaaa! always come to your post everyday, just to see what your up! Upvoted aloha Al
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STOPGood post - it makes perfect, though mildly-disappointing sense to me :)
Big people can do great here i terms of earning but small people can also do good if they get support from big people.
Very true, and this community as a whole seems very much willing to help others along their way. Thanks for the comment!