The Various Ways to Climb the Qurator Tiers!

At the end of last month, I wrote about how I joined @qurator, the community project that gives upvotes to support quality content authors.

Image source: one of the Qurator project's promotional banners.

In my other post, I had talked about how to reach higher tiers to receive bigger upvotes. But a few weeks after I published that, the project underwent some restructuring, and the requirements for access to tiers 1 and 2 changed. As my previous post can't be edited anymore because it's been more than seven days after its publication, I decided to write another post to talk about the changes.

From what I understood, the price of STEEM and SBD - and consequently, the value of Qurator's upvotes - were falling too much. So, it was necessary to pay for additional SP in the lease market in order to get the SP Qurator needed to keep the upvote values on the same level as when the situation was favorable. It got to a point where Qurator's Steemit posts' earnings weren't enough to pay the extra SP leases, and the team was paying out of their own pockets to compensate. As trying to maintain the project like this was becoming unfeasible, Qurator had to implement some changes. Now, in addition to upvotes and SP delegations, Qurator is also accepting a monthly payment for access to tiers 1 and 2 as a way to get more STEEM to cover the SP leases. The new requirements will apply as of May 1st, 2018. You may read Qurator's official post explaining about the restructuring and the changes here.

The New Requirements

Below is a summary of the new requirements:

To stay on tier 0:

• For tier 0, nothing has changed. The only requirement is still to register and pay the one-time subscription fee of 4 STEEM.

Some ways to move up to tier 1:

• Vote on at least 7 Qurator posts per week with upvotes worth $0.03, or a 100% weight upvote if your vote isn't worth that much yet (this is my case).
• Or delegate 100 SP.
• Or pay 1 STEEM per month.

Some ways to climb to tier 2:

• vote on at least 7 Qurator posts per week with upvotes worth $0.05 (unfortunately, there's no longer a way to reach tier 2 only with upvotes if your vote isn't worth that much yet).
• Or delegate 200 SP.
• Or pay 2 STEEM per month.

Note that there are several ways to reach a tier. Tier 1 is still very easy, since you can just reach it with upvotes regardless of how much your votes are worth, so anyone can reach Tier 1 just by always upvoting. In my case, I have @qurator in my fanbase on Steemauto. I just leave the 100% upvoting on autopilot, and keep an eye on the Qurator posts to vote manually if autovotes fail for some reason.

Combinations to get to tier 2!

And this is where it starts to get interesting (and a bit confusing at first :P ). Upvotes, STEEM payments and SP delegations stack! So, for tier 2, aside from the straightforward ways above, there are several other interesting requirement combinations you can use to reach it. Those involve meeting the Tier 1 requirements above and "completing" the rest. The logic is "tier 1 value" + "tier 1 value" = "tier 2", where "tier 1 value" can be 1 STEEM or 100 SP or at least 7 upvotes per week. Examples:

• Reach tier 1 (which is halfway to tier 2) with upvotes, + pay 1 STEEM per month (the other half of the way).
• Reach tier 1 with upvotes (the first half of the way to tier 2), + delegate 100 SP (the second half of the way).
• Delegate 100 SP (Tier 1, half of the way) + Pay 1 STEEM per month (the other half).

I'm just talking about tier 0 to 2 because those are the only ones I can reach (tier 3 and up involve delegating SP, which I barely have enough of for myself at the moment :P ), but it's interesting to note that from 3 and up there are some rather crazy combinations too! Check out this comment to get an idea.

There are so many options :D . Very flexible. Those who have a lot of SP to spare can delegate. Those who don't have so much can stay in tiers 1 or 2 through upvotes + STEEM. Those who don't want to give upvotes because they have a hard time managing their voting power can just pay the STEEM instead of upvoting. Those who have neither STEEM or SP can give upvotes and stay in tier 1, which is already better than tier 0. And so on... there are options that fit various preferences, needs and pockets. I find this flexibility quite interesting, and believe Qurator has found a good solution.

In my case, I'll stay on Tier 1 via 100% upvotes (my vote isn't even worth $0.01 yet), and maybe add 1 STEEM (if conditions allow) and try to go to Tier 2.