RE: On Guilds and Managing Expectations
This is false. Curie now more than ever has doubled down on its goal for discovering, rewarding and retaining new authors on Steemit.
The previous submission times were limited to six hours, were they not? Just seeking clarification. I was also told by someone close to the project that curators could in fact vote via Streemian at the 45-minute mark. Other than that, the threshold is 150 minutes, or 2.5 hours. Is this not correct? (I will edit the post upon clarification.)
Also false. The Daily Curie posts are not upvoted by the guild or @curie, and have not been even once in 2017. All votes are from the Steem community.
I stand corrected. I will make the appropriate edit. However, I would like to note that this wasn't really the point. It was mostly a comparative issue to what Steem Guild does for payments.
I would also like to point out that this wasn't necessarily a critique about Curie. Most of the recent issues have been about Steem Guild and that was the focal point of this post. The other general comments about the effectiveness of the guilds can apply to all guilds, however, regarding the adoption, retention, and morale of the community. There isn't growth and the attrition rates are still high, despite the efforts of the guilds. And that is not to say that such efforts are bad - it is merely an acknowledgement that they aren't working...that other issues appear to be a bigger factor.
The new Curie system is a decentralized submission platform where everyone is free to discover and submit posts. The standard guideline is 150 minutes. However, the top 12 curators by Curators Score get access to the 45 minute point. Each week the top 12 curators shuffles by the performance of the curators the previous week. You are invited to submit posts by new authors at https://streemian.com/guild/curie. You are a valuable curator and I have no doubt you will rise to the Top 12 pretty quickly. The finder's fee of 8 Steem per approved post is available for everyone.
The reason why there's a tiered system is to avoid unnecessary spamming and streamline reviewing. This is why the previous guideline was 6 hours as our moderators had to check for guidelines manually in #curie, but with our automated frontend, we could reduce it down to 150 minutes and 45 minutes.
Curation guilds have nothing to do with growing the platform. This is a major misconception. That's the area of outreach programs and general marketing. Curation guilds have an impact in improving visibility of good content and retaining authors. They have been a remarkable success in this area. There's enough anecdotal evidence for this - you can see hundreds if not thousands of authors make it clear in as many words - "We would have left Steemit long ago were it not for X curation guild". Indeed, pre-Curie, there were only 20-30 authors which were getting all the votes, and the bots were swarming them. There were hundreds/thousands of authors which exited the platform in August/September. Maybe of them returned in December with HF16, and I'm happy to report that Curie has managed to retain many of those returning authors.
Indeed, the platform has been growing since the troughs pre-HF16. The daily post count is now 50% over the trough (averaging 1200-1300 now versus 700-800 at its lowest) and active voters has more than doubled. Yet, much of that is due to the positive sentiment around HF16 - that's the kind of thing that grows the platform. Crucially, the posts are much higher quality and Curie has to constantly raise its quality bar to adjust. You'll notice that the platform has not been shrinking this time, unlike in July, and successfully retaining the influx of users in December. This is where the curation guilds are succeeding admirably.
I did say to each his own, but I hope my additional comments here broadens your perspective to the real impact of curation guilds.
Now, I'm looking forward to outreach programs and some of Steemit Inc's roadmap of growing the user base and bringing in new authors. I promise you it will not be a repeat of July 2016 where thousands of users came and thousands of users existed. This time, we shall retain them.
If we fail to do so - then I shall be Curie's greatest critic.