My Journey to Join Qurator

Recently I have been looking for, and writing about, initiatives that help give new Steemians more exposure. One of the most interesting ones I found is @qurator, though it may be a bit hard to join, as they have high quality standards. After lots of planning, I sent my subscription last Saturday. I was uneasy thinking that I might be rejected, but as I opened Steemit on Tuesday morning (March 27th, 2018), I was greeted by a pleasant wallet message. I'm finally in! I became a member, or a "Qurite," as they call it.

What is Qurator?

Image source: one of the Qurator project's promotional banners (click it to learn more about the project)

The short answer: @qurator is a project that helps promote quality content. It has probably the best "vote bot" on Steemit. You pay (at the time of this writing) a one-time 4 STEEM subscription fee, and receive one upvote a day from their bot forever! ... Unless you break the rules and are kicked out, of course.

Rules?

The long answer, and the rules: as a project that helps promote quality content on Steemit, Qurator only agrees to support authors that post original and quality content and that is up to their high quality standards (no chance for spammers who post random pictures or copy-pasted articles from the Internet!). Aside from upvoting their members' posts, Qurator resteems two members' posts a day, features 5 more every day on their "Daily Qurator" post, and also hold contests like photografy and food photo competitions.

If you have the STEEM and believe you have the quality requirements, to join you must transfer the subscription fee to @qurator with your username in the memo. Once you send the subscription payment, their team of moderators will evaluate your posts. If you're accepted, you receive a wallet message confirming you are in. If not, you're refunded.

I had first heard of Qurator by the end of February, and thought it was interesting. I don't know how they evaluate content in languages other than English, but since I usually write my posts in both English and Portuguese, I concluded I could give it a try. Only, I had just joined Steemit in the beginning of February and still had no STEEM to pay the subscription, which was 2 STEEM at the time. In the beginning of March, I got my first STEEM, 3 STEEM for having helped editing the Steem Center wiki. But one of the requirements to join Qurator was to have a minimum of ten posts, which I still didn't have. So, as I wrote more posts, I kept the goal of eventually joining Qurator in mind, and made sure to use their quality standards as guidelines. Below is my reasoning for some of the rules:

• Always write something useful and relevant, 150 words minimum. Even if you just want to post a photo or a Youtube or DTube video, write a description and give context for what the photo/video is about. This will surely make your post more complete and interesting.
• Since Steemit posts make money, only use images that can be used commercially, and always cite image sources to prove that you are really allowed to use them, even if the source says attribution isn't required. Give preference either to your own images (and state that they're your own), or images that are in the public domain, or that are under a Creative Commons license variant that allows commercial use.
• No plagiarism. Again, no copy-pasted articles from the Internet! Even if it's an article you wrote yourself on another site. Well, not sure about this last bit about your own content, but this is how I do it, not only because of Qurator, but because search engines don't like duplicated content. I have a personal blog outside of Steemit, and sometimes I want to promote one of the posts I wrote there, but I don't want search engines penalizing my blog for duplicated content. So, instead of pasting my content into a Steemit post, I write a brief introduction explaining how the post came to be (the same reasoning for the photos/videos topic above), then put a link to my blog post so that anyone interested can access it.
• Even after you are accepted into Qurator, make sure to continue following the rules and keeping your level of quality, as the moderators keep an eye on the members. (warning: whoever begins trying to get "easy" upvotes by abusing the system and posting garbage will be kicked out, with no right to get a refund for the subscription fee. It's only fair)
• Qurator dislikes flag wars and would rather stay away from the drama side of Steemit (me too!), and they won't support posts that incentivize those. They even have a competition that incentivizes "upvote wars" instead :P .

Once I had more posts, I thought I was ready to pay the subscription and put my content to the test... only to find out that the fee had increased to 4 STEEM! And I still had only 3...

The month of March went by. I managed to get 3 SBD from the sum of my posts, and began considering converting one of them to get the STEEM required for me to have 4. Last week had been a crazy week where the STEEM price was too close to the SBD price, or even higher, which from what I've read, isn't something that happens often. I kept watching the market, and last Saturday, when I noticed 1 STEEM could be bought with 0.99 SBD, I took the plunge and traded 1 SBD. With my 4 STEEM ready, I made the transfer to @qurator, and waited... could my posts pass the rigorous quality evaluation?

As Sunday and Monday went by, I dreaded receiving the 4 STEEM back with a message saying my application was rejected. On Tuesday morning, though, I opened my web browser and accessed Steemit, and there it was. The message thanking me for having subscribed, which means I managed to become a Qurite! I was relieved, and very happy to know that my posts' quality was good enough!

So, how much is their upvote worth?

Qurator always makes a status update post saying how much the upvote is currently. The last one I read before writing this post said the upvote ranged from $0.03 (for tier 0 members) to as much as $6.50! (for diamond tier members, though this is out of reach for most of us small fish) The Portuguese version of this same article got an upvote worth $0.03 from @qurator-tier-0.

What is this about tiers?

Upvotes from members help keep Qurator's SP going, and to show appreciation, Qurator places the members in tiers according to how much they support the project. Tier 0 is for those who just joined and haven't shown Qurator any support yet. Tiers 1 and 2 are for those who upvote @qurator's posts with 100% voting weight (tier 1 is for members who vote at least 4 posts a week, and tier 2 is for who votes at least 7 times a week), and the higher tiers are for the most avid supporters who can both upvote and delegate a lot of SP.

Tiers 3 and above are out of reach for most of us newbies, but tier 2 is fairly easy to reach. According to the update post linked above, tier 2 members are currently receiving $0.15 upvotes (not bad, right?). The task of voting all Qurator posts may be automated with a site like Steemauto, by adding @qurator to your fanbase (a list of authors you want to always support with your upvote), and configuring it to use a 100% voting weight. And you can also set your account to vote Qurator at around 30 minutes after it makes a post, which means you can even get curation rewards!

For more information and all the details about the Qurator project and its rules, check out their intro post by clicking on the banner near the top of this post, or here. If you like what they do, you may consider voting them for witness, so that they can continue maintaining the project and promoting quality content on Steemit. Learn how by reading their witness announcement.