Two ways to curate... One may be better for steemit than the other...
Curation can be a source of revenue/steem power if that is your goal. Yet the way the algorithm is set up if this is the goal that you pursue it may not actually be the method of curation that is best for steem and steemit.
I know most of us want to see steem and steemit succeed. Curation does not produce income as quickly as writing a decent post for most of us users. It can be lucrative for those with a lot of steem power.
The algorithm is such that it awards the most curation reward for being the first or as close to the first as you can get at predicting a post will be popular. This leads people to auto-vote on authors that consistently have a lot of up votes for everything they write. There are also bots that vote on anything that "good curators" vote on, so they just follow the votes of another person and vote as they do. This makes sense if your goal is to maximize the amount of STEEM POWER rewards you get from curation.
The problem here is in perception. Is that steem power you get from curation worth more than improving the value and accuracy of steem/steemit itself? For some of you I believe you may actually consider improving steem/steemit to be more important than maximizing your curation income.
If this is the case would it not seem wise to seek out new users and intentionally up vote good posts by them, especially their introduceyourself and introducemyself posts? You should still vote on established authors, but should we do so simply because this person gets a lot of votes, or should we vote on it because we liked the content?
Perception is important. You need to decide in terms of curation which goal is more important to you, the amount of steem power you get from curation, or improving steemit. Depending upon what your answer is you may wish to reassess your approach to curation. I know this may not be something everyone can do, but it was something I found myself pondering today as I went and voted on a bunch of introduceyourself posts and I realized maybe others had forgotten or not considered this.
Any images in this post you are welcome to use in your own posts, per the concept behind #steemit4free
Steem On!
![](https://steemitimages.com/640x0/http://i.imgur.com/m1rDTas.png)
I agree wholeheartedly. It's also important to remember that "improving steemit" means increasing the value of the steem that's already in your wallet. It's not entirely an altruistic thing. More like short-term vs. long-term.
I try to upvote some introduceyourself posts every day. I also try to upvote content I encounter that is well-written/prepared, even if it's on a topic that doesn't interest me or presents an opinion with which I disagree.
As I explain here, I'm also a big fan of bot curation for similar reasons.
I like the idea of making a lot of revenue simply by upvoting stuff but at the end of the day, to me it is too much effort to try to game the system and defeats the purpose anyway. I just upvote the stuff I like most, new or old, popular or not.
Me too. I follow some people that EVERY post they write does well, but I actually only occasionally up vote their stuff if I actually liked it.
I'm relatively new and only follow when I'm very impressed with the post for one reason or another. I couldn't just blindly follow in order to gain followers. In fact I have been giving reasons why followed/upvoted and this gave me an idea; why not add a drop down box on the upvote button? This could give a selection of choices for why upvoted IE "inspiring" "thought-provoking" "educational" "helpful" "up-lifting" "funny".....whatever.
These could be used as search terms by a reader to find stories/blogs - tagged by the READERS rather than the AUTHORS only as at present. As I'm also not a fan of auto upvoting, I think this may help combat that. The clicking of the drop down box would be the proof of human type thing.....
This could work on this site, but steemit is kind of like a Television. STEEM is all of the channels, the posts, etc. So Steemit is not the only place that is able to vote, post, etc. It can even be done by command line (CLI). So this WOULD help with steemit and I like the idea of getting more feedback, but it would not stop bots or things like that since they actually interact directly with the blockchain and not steemit. Nice idea though.
Thanks for that........yes, not so good at the technical details.......lol
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the second half of Dec 22. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $5.55 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Dec 22 - Part II. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
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Personally, I like to vote on science posts, plus posts from people I follow. That's my way to track new users I may be interested reading from them.
Good thoughts. I think you are right though, the more people that we can bring in and show them that they can actually make some money here, the more likely they are to stay... and bring their friends!
Hey, your 3D art is great! I am searching for talent like yours for someone else that wants to pay people to help them create a steemit video or other secret projects. I will add your name to the list.