Steemit: Curation - Manual / Bot / Mixed-mode?
Some thoughts on curation in the wake of steemvoter.com downtime.
Yes that's right, we broke steemvoter.com - Clearly there are too many of us who are too lazy seek excellent content and thus are resorting to a vote-bot to curate for us.
Is it a case of laziness though, or are we community building, brick by brick?
pixabay source
In the beginning
When I started out on Steemit.com without friends already present and without a follower to my name, my vote didn't even change the reward total displayed when the up-vote button changed colour.
Is this actually working?!
I'm jumping ahead to say that things are a bit different at present with the delegated SP I am very fortunate to have, I can give a vote worth about 7$ in Steemit interface money, which is something like $15 liquid (SBD) and $15 STEEM after curation is removed and at today's prices. Woop!
I feel this is a really decent sum of money to be able to gift to a piece of content - I'd like to be able to be able to give that vote out 1000's of times a day!
Anyway, we aren't all Steem millionaires (yet) and so we have to start small, and slowly build up our Steem Power, our friends, and communities.
And so, as I started to gain Steem Power (SP) and followers, and produce content on a regular basis, I began noticing the same names appearing in the voters list. Of course, this is super easy to do when you less than 20 votes on a piece of content, as was the case for months and months for me personally.
These regular votes, and blog commentators, provided huge encouragement for me to carry on with my content creation, and the 'grind'. That's not my word, it has just been passed down from hard-working Steemian, to hard-working Steemian. Because hard work it is, and hugely time-consuming it can be.
As I looked at these voters with heart-felt admiration (for 10 minutes per voter), I remembered that they may have a blog too! Best go check their feed and see what the deal was with regards to their content...
The weeks passed, and this cycle of posting and doing the rounds of visiting my supporters and other interesting content was taking longer and longer.
More votes were arriving, and the network of people who's content/interactions I enjoyed soon got bigger than what I could hold in memory. So about 12 names, or was it 11....
After a little while
I reached the point where my following list was no longer manageable and it was at around 200 or so accounts - it's over 1000 these days. I thought 'i'll create another list', and use a list of bookmarks to manage who I visit, and that list quickly became too long also.
As this point though, I'd reached 20/30 users I felt a connection with - I liked their content, and I liked how they presented themselves on the platform.
It is here where I openly admit to supporting good content, as much as good followers, and as much as good people trying their best for themselves and the community.
And so to help me curate as I thought would please me the most, I chose a vote-bot ensure that i'd reach a person even if I was away for a weekend, or just didn't have any time for a day or two.
I wanted to provide continual encouragement to help them want to stick around, even if I was unable to comment or choose the exact vote weight I thought the content deserved.
I think I started at 50-100% weight all for the accounts listed in Steemvoter, and I think the first account I added was @minnowsupport. Not actually an individuals account as such, more of a community account for new members.
As the number of accounts I added to the list increased, the weight applied to each vote had to be decreased. Luckily we've had a nice rise in the price of STEEM, and I received some delegation, which have together made my vote of 100% back in June, the same as a 2% vote today. (Wow!)
A few days before steemvoter.com went offline (which I think was Monday), I purchased the premium package which increased the limit of 50 accounts you can vote for, to something like 500.
Yes that's right. A just turned 'dolphin' status user has 50 accounts that they auto-vote for. And, I still have voting power spare each day to support interactions on my blogs, introduce/support new users, and pick out one of two excellent pieces of content to give a larger vote to.
The key point for me is that I always keep spare voting power no matter how big my auto-vote list becomes. This 'left-over' SP is what I use for new users, great content, and to stop myself falling into the 'silo-voting' trap that others have succumbed to.
I think it is also worth mentioning that I don't expect killer curation rewards for the accounts I set auto-votes for. The reward is for those guys.
And now
Currently, it's 90% manual voting for me, as I have found steemdunk.xyz to help out a little this week. (20 votes free)
What I have been doing is giving bigger votes to what catches my eye in my feed, and looking out for good intro posts, but then I think about why I support some people unconditionally. They have helped me, they are paying bills with SBD, they have given a lot of time and effort and should be helped in return.
So to answer the question in the title of this blog:
Manual curators, I salute you!
Manual curation, particularly by large SP account holders, is a like a job. And indeed, @curie, @ocd, and others, are paid to do it. It takes time and energy and should be done with consideration of the platform, as well as the rewards.
100% Auto-voters, meh.
Sorry, you've reached Silo land. New content, new users, will drive the platform forward, and you should try to keep any eye out for this.
Mixed-mode works
Users who mix autos to support their community with manual votes to support new users and excellent content, I also salute you.
As long as I can manage my vote power to allow curation of great content, build communities, support new users, then I am happy to classify myself as a mixed-mode curator.
And so I ask: How do you, do yours? (Curation, that is!)
Are you missing SteemVoter? Or would you not be seen using such evil machinery! (and why?)
Thanks for reading my ramblings, hopefully I shall see you in my comments :)
Asher @abh12345
Manual curation takes a lot of time these days, due to so many posts, from garbage to good ones. Also our own FEED gets swamped due to to many users we follow. I think to prevent Steemit to become a bot network, we should continue to manually curate. Realising this requires a LOT of time, I think we shall create more curation teams like those you mentioned @curie @ocd. I think we need more independent curation teams. @curie started to support curation teams focussing on a specific segment. It would be great when users who generally use auto voters would give their support to curation teams. Since curation teams generally get some rewards (not a lot but still) it'll give opportunities to those who like to manual curate to earn something, as well it will drive good curation, and with good curation also a better distribution of the daily SP/SBD towards those posts that deserves rewards. In the end, I thing with the curation team approach we will drive Steemit to a platform with more valuable information we share, a more honest distribution of funds, and we prevent Steemit to become a bot network. WIN/WIN/WIN as I see it :)
Yes for sure, teams of people will be required in future.
'Communities' may help. I envisage many accounts springing up where you can delegate to, or trail this account which has a particular category/tag focus.
This will focus your vote to communities you wish to support, although I don't think you'll reach top 5 in 'league 1' trailing potentially the largest vote on a post.
Cheers!
Yeh, for the league you need to vote before the curation teams or other big votes are done, so yeh, what I propose will not maximise curation income. But that said, when having some establishment on Steemit, I think rewards from posts is factors higher than rewards from curation. So, better to concentrate on bringing valuable content to the community, and engage with this who you like to engage. I suppose bots could be created to trail curation team votes, ie predicting which posts will be voted for. That will be a good road to explore, since this will drive innovation in bot creation to become much more intelligent than they are now.
Yes I agree and think this is a key focus. Curation reward can't match valuable content. Cheers!
Went full manual a few weeks back. My VP has dropped like a rock. :)
Haha, once you pop you can't stop?
Well it's good to hear that I think, maybe not for you but I'm sure all the extra/larger votes are appreciated 😁
That is where discipline comes in....and putting yourself in Steemit time out.
I usually end up there at least once a day.
I try to keep my VP over 90% and run it down twice a day...first thing in the morning and later in the day.
There are time I find myself at 85% which takes way to long to power back up to close to 100%...when I do it right I can move from 100 to 90 to close to 100 back to 90 during a day.....
A great topic @abh12345.
I am on the manual end of things and I can tell you it is time consuming. Fortunately, a lot of my votes go to those who comment on my stuff...it is a way of saying thank you to them and interacting with those who follow me.
I have cleaned out my follow list to make my feed more manageable but, like you said, it is still tough...and I do miss a great deal of quality content.
Thus I am led to believe some type of hybrid system would be best. Of course, that could create a problem if many decided to up their posts from 2 to 4 in a day.
Personally, I am thinking the communities will help a bit more since it will "tighten" us up in groups around those subject that interest us the most.
Sadly, there is no perfect answer...we can just try to adapt and adjust as we go.
Thank you @taskmaster4450
I also adopt this approach for the same reason.
A hybrid approach works for me, and yes hopefully communities, however that pans out, will help towards the best solution.
With this approach you do need to monitor increased activity. It also works as a reminder to go visit a user, if for example you use something like steemworld.org, to watch what's happening.
Thanks as always for your extensive and well-formed comments :)
All manual currently. It was much easier when I had only 10 votes!
Currently I support one fiction project with a fair amount of my votes which makes manual curation easier. If I wanted to spread the love a little more thinly then I would need to find a lot more time, or move towards automation for authors who I know produce good content.
I guess the other option is vote trailing a curator that you trust. I think this could be used more. If certain curators - those with more time - advertised themselves as supporting high quality articles from a particular area, then people could trail their votes to support that area.
In response to the last point, i think curie/ocd/sndbox have this in mind. Although your opinion of high quality, and particular areas of interest may differ from theirs :)
Sort of related, I'm glad my auto vote was on your most recent post, prior to @ned resteeming it and putting out on his feed on twitter! :D :D
Well done!
Thanks! It was a nice surprise. I should probably have written July on that chart though!
Did we break it or is it updating for the changes in the next fork?
I think it broke prior to any fork activity! But perhaps I am just writing for the headlines a bit there :)
Manual, and it is incredible to see the numbers reached each time.
Respect to you, how many hours do you spend each day on average?
Cumulatively an average of 6/7 hours on weekdays, maybe more or less on weekends.
That is an incredible amount of time! Do you work for a curation team? I think some may be interested if they know you have a good amount of time to sift through content.
No, just personal curating, sometimes I help friends who are curators get at some fantastic undervalued posts.
great post / we gotta watch out for silo land, so true / resteemed
Yes that is key!
And thank you!
Yes, it's hard work, which takes a lot of time. But it seems to me that now we are back to how everything was planned: now people read posts before giving their vote, manually choose %VP for each article and see what they are voting for. Now it's not just a blind supporting of the trending authors with expectation of higher curator's reward.
I am sure that many have revised their list of auto-voting.
P.S. All my votes given for the time of my being here (almost 1 year) were given manually.
I appreciate the time it takes for sure.
None of my autos were/are for trending types, most of them are in Silo land and do not need my vote.
Thanks for your comments and manual curation! 😁
Laziness ? No.... As you said. it's not. We can't read everything anymore.
And yes, Manual Curator... I salute you too ! I still don't get how people can read so many post. I am a OCD curator and this only takes me hours and hours... OK. I am quiet slow to read. But still.... Hours! I am on steem full time. I don't have another job, or kids, or anything to do except steem. And even with that I feel there are too much stuff : I can't reply to everyone, I can't welcome everyone (I mean, in the french community I even not check the english, only sometimes).
And comments..... It takes sooooooo much time. And this is the best. I love comment. i love people who comment on my post better than the rewards..... :-/
But I also want to support with small amount many people that I trust, people who are there for many months, with whom I grew up and I saw they always did a correct job. So, for them, I started to put the auto-voter..... and stopped to comment :-/
What a dilemma. Steem take us so much time and give us so much back but still... I think, this autovoter is spreading a bit of love to people every times they post, they remember that you trust them, that you encourage them, you don't want them to leave the platform.
Totally agree!
You can spend your whole day here and still feel you missed out on a lot!
Comments are normally where the best information is found - the article generally asks the questions, and then you have many different answers to consider.
Yes and yes, and these are the reasons I can't wait for steemvoter to return!
Thanks @roxane!
I am missing steem-voter and the people who are on my list are probably missing it too because I don't always have time to stay on top of my feed and vote them all up manually.
But I'm a mixed mode curator. When I do see something good in my feed I manually vote, though I often only pick up new people to follow if they've been resteemed these days.
Very much sounds like my plan yeah.
In a way it's good to pick people up via resteems through your feed, at least you know the content has value to this person.
Cheers!