Introduction

Over 21000 posts get published in a single day! That is what I realized while watching the new posts feed. I counted 15 new posts that were published in the space of a minute - that's 900 posts per hour.

One of the biggest drawbacks of Steemit lies in its fast moving new posts feed. It moves down faster than the mightiest waterfall in the world - reason why I call it the "Steemit Niagara". In mere seconds your new post can disappear from the feed, never to be found again. Unless you have a large number of followers who will see your post in their own feed, that post on which you might have spent several minutes - or most likely hours if you're a newbie, will not be voted on or even seen by anyone.

The solution lies in content curation. A new Steemit member who posts good content deserves to be noticed and rewarded. One of the tasks of being a member of the community is to curate good content. But few are able to do so on a regular basis due to lack of time - or maybe they just lack enough motivation to do it. To compound the issue there are bots that can be programmed to vote for the posts of predetermined bloggers. With automation the natural urge is to put the bot to work for you instead of curating manually.

So where does that leave Steemit bloggers who may be new or a few months old whose high quality content barely gets noticed?

Fortunately, there are curation initiatives within the community that address this aspect of Steemit. While Curie is an ongoing initiative, the new Buildawhale curation is widening the scope of curation and opening up new opportunities in the days to come .

Curie is described as follows:

Curie is a community project with a mission to help discover and reward new content creators, and give them the exposure that they need. Everyday, over a hundred curators from around the world select hidden gems from new authors.

In order to be a curator with Curie, one has to be very discerning with the selection of content because Curie's internal scores will indicate how well a curator does the job. This means that it is better to submit one or two excellent posts instead of putting forth a whole bunch of average posts. The posts that are approved will be rewarded with a finder's fee.

Buildawhale and its Curation Digest are defined as below:

A voting bot that not only upvotes your content but also gives you the opportunity to get exposure with its Build-A-Whale Daily.

Curation Digest is the result of concentrated curation by team @buildawhale and is a brand-new community-centric content series highlighting the quality and original content created by Steemians.

Buildawhale is an upvoting bot to which you pay a minimum of 0.1 SBD. Curation is an additional service that is being introduced to help the community. The Buildawhale curation team will identify good posts from among the submissions for upvoting.

Curie vs Buildawhale Curation

Please note that this is a preliminary analysis and Buildawhale Curation is work in progress while Curie has been around for some time. However, there is a lot of interest generated by the new project obviously because it brings on even more visibility and rewards for Steemians which takes the ongoing initiative by Curie a level upward. The comparison is being done with the help of information available in posts by the creators, mainly the sources mentioned at the end of the article.

Curie vs Buildawhale - Type of Initiative

Curie is purely a curation guild that manually curates content submitted by curators, again done manually, from new posts created by bloggers on Steemit with a reputation between 25 and 52. Buildawhale is a bot with a manual curation feature added to it - open to anyone who uses the bot. Buildawhale Curation has no bar on reputation hence the audience would be wider depending upon the number of people who use the bot.

Curie vs Buildawhale - Whose Is It?

Team Curie has an established Steemian and Witness at the helm, liberosist, who has been leading the operation for over a year. On the other hand Buildawhale Curation is led by chiefmappster & themarkymark who have have proven themselves with the creation of Buildawhale. This is another life saving bot which upvotes posts and gives a return on investment, a source of encouragement for minnows, and a help for tenured members whose posts could do with a bit more visibility.

Free vs Paid

Curie is absolutely free for submissions which is done by designated curators who submit selected high quality posts of bloggers(but not their own posts). An internal curation shortlisting team checks the submissions and approves or rejects them. Shortlisted submissions are published on Curie's Streemian page. The blogger who created the post is not involved in the curation at all, and usually gets a pleasant surprise for being chosen and rewarded for quality content. The Buildawhale Digest selection will be carried out only on posts that are submitted to the bot for upvoting, and is open to anyone who can pay at least 0.1 SBD - this includes one's own posts that may be submitted for a boost. As per their blog post, the team's effort is to make sure that only high quality content is chosen for the Daily Digest.

Currently it is estimated that about 90% of upvoting by bots are requested by the bloggers themselves, for their own posts. In fact as a bot user, I can testify to the fact that an upvoting bot provides a great boost to a good post that may not have been noticed otherwise, not only in terms of morale and enhanced visibility but also for a reward which accrues from an upvote by a Steem Power-backed whale bot.

Qualifiers

Posts submitted to Curie must be more than 2 hours old and less than 20 hours, with a pending payout less than 1 SBD at the time of submission. The only criteria for Buildawhale is submission of the post for upvoting which involves a payment of at least 0.1 SBD. This means that any post that has been rewarded by an amount that exceeds $1 does not qualify for Curie, but does qualify for Buildawhale curation.

Criteria For Selection

Curie's selection criteria includes posts on any topic except, in their own words..

No Steemit-related, photography, religious, introduceyourself or political posts.Only English posts.

Again no restrictions by Team Buildawhale as yet, although I do feel that curating introduction posts and political articles can be a bit tricky.

Random vs Fixed Sample

Submission to Curie can tend to be random and depends upon when their curators are available online and which sections of Steemit they may be browsing through. It is quite impossible to browse through all new posts for a few hours even when your eyes are glued to the screen for those hours. Buildawhale selections have to be from the posts that have been submitted for upvoting. This means that your post has a higher chance of being selected for curation with Buildawhale - but subject to payment of minimum 0.1 SBD by the submitter as the fee for using the bot for upvoting.

Probability of a Post Being Curated

When it comes to Curie, if your post is missed by the curator maybe due to a poor title/ no thumbnail image or due to no curators being online at the time, your post goes down the feed unnoticed and does not stand a chance of being selected for curation. On the other hand your post is definitely in the running if someone has submitted it to Buildawhale - which could well be yourself. In the event that it is not selected for the Buildawhale Digest you do get a whale upvote at least as also the reward which follows a whale upvote. The fact that you can submit your own post gives you a feeling of some degree of empowerment.

Transparency

Curie's operation is completely transparent with curated posts being featured on a page on a Streemian page, and regular Curie Weekly Updates with details of curation and the curators team. Since Buildawhale curation is still work in progress they may soon come up with an interface for displaying the efforts of their team's curation.

Curators

Curie has a team of good curators taken from the community who have been given an opportunity of contributing to the community and receive a reward for submitting good posts. They can also refer new curators and earn a reward. Buildawhale has announced that it is hiring new curators who in turn can form their own teams. The rewards structure has not been announced yet, but is in the works.

Disadvantages of Curie's curation?

The only disadvantage with Curie's curation seems to be a post losing visibility due to the fast paced feed. Curators being individual volunteers from the Steemit community are free to curate at any time which means that there could be instances when no curators are available. But when they are, they certainly do a good job. The proof is in the curated posts which you can see on the Streemian Curie Page here.

Cons of Buildawhale curation

Will poor quality posts go through?

Prabably not, as one of the owners of Buildawhale says:

The curation is hand chosen based on quality and usefulness.

Is there any chance of misuse?

Content curation in the true sense of the word is carried out by a third party that selects the best content. As @thatsweeneyguy says in a comment:

I just feel we have enough ways to pat one's self on the back. I'll keep an eye out for the daily posts, but I'll probably be doing it more to watch how much of it comes from actual curation, and how much of it is self-voting.

The Buildawhale team seems determined in their effort to curate only good content. Some might even wonder whether the amount paid to the bot will have a bearing on curation. To which the key statement by @chiefmappster is:

The curation aspect is unaffected by monetary influences and is to highlight quality content. We will devote resources to highlight these posts and provide additional exposure through our curation service. This service is free of charge and is an additional value added by our service.

Conclusion

While Curie has always been an amazing opportunity for quality content to get due recognition, Buildawhale takes it further by offering free curation to a paid upvoting service. Both curation projects will further enhance value in the Steemit community and help in adequately rewarding good content curators.

I will update this post or create a new one as Buildawhale's work in progress goes live.

What do you feel about curation on Steemit? Do you think services like Buildawhale curation are needed on the platform? Between Buildawhale and Curie, which one do you think is going to be more effective? Please comment below.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found the comparison useful!

Further Reading:
1. Build A Whale: Steemit's Newest Vehicle for Real, Positive Change
2. @buildawhale's Curation Digest
3. Curie's 1st Year Update(with Additional International Support Announcement)
4. Steemit Chat Curie Channel(pinned post)

Image Sources: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5