RE: On Guilds and Managing Expectations
Recently, Project Curie has adopted new guidelines for finding “undervalued” content, which allows them to vote on posts beginning at 45 minutes. Based on their intent, these voting practices from the guilds are contradictory. They don’t appear to be in line with their stated goals for discovery and rewarding content.
This is false. Curie now more than ever has doubled down on its goal for discovering, rewarding and retaining new authors on Steemit. You misunderstand the new guidelines. They were designed to absolutely decentralise submissions to the community. We were finally able to do that with our automated frontend.
In the case of Project Curie, the guild publishes one daily post which is then upvoted by the guild and its members and followers. While it’s still not ideal and still requires collective participation, it’s only the one post per day that gets upvoted.
Also false. The Daily Curie posts are not upvoted by the guild or @curie, and have not been for well over a month. All votes are from the Steem community. You can tell from the comments that there's overwhelming support for the project and it has helped retain hundreds of not thousands of users on Steemit. It's no surprise that they happily save a vote for @curie every day. The Daily Curie posts will be completely Payout Declined shortly after Hardfork 17 - we hope to fund the project entirely through SP delegation.
I would appreciate it if in the future you ask for a comment in #curie
on Steemit.chat before writing a post like this - we would be happy to clear your doubts. It's a public channel open for discussions so everything's on the record. You can scroll back through the history - you'll still find accusations from @noganoo - we don't delete discussions (only submissions). It hurts the community if you misrepresent basic facts.
I have no comment to the rest of your post - to each his own. I'd just like to add one point you seemed to have ignored completely. Indeed, the most important aspect about curation guilds - the community. The community of curators on Curie makes it the most engaged initiative on Steemit. These folks are dedicated and diligent and spend as much effort and time; and arguably bring as much value to Steem as content creators. Indeed, this is Steem's one true USP - rewarding curators, which could ultimately lead to a better platform than Reddit, which has a massive problem of content being lost in the void. The curator community in Curie is vibrant and thriving; in fact of late they are starting to greatly outnumber the influx of new authors. We hope the outreach and marketing initiatives take hold soon - Curie is primed and prepared for a massive influx of authors.
Most of all, I'd like to see more curation guilds founded. Plenty of unused whale voting power. I see you have formed your own independent guild with @tombstone, and I greatly appreciate that. I also notice you have exactly the same funding model as Steem Guild - I have no problem with that either, it's the free market in action. I would just like to see more guilds open up soon. Comment curation particularly seems like an obvious and also lucrative choice.
PS: Just to re-iterate, Curie's sole aim is to discover, reward and retain new authors on Steemit. As simple as that. Please feel free to criticize the project based on those grounds.
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.)
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.
ive been downvoting these, but am taking them out of my downvote list. I was unaware of this. That said lets be realistic. The daily curie posts aren't the only vote-funding for curie.