A few thoughts about curation - and why we are all talk show hosts!

Curation is most important on steemit if we want the community we say we want.

IF we want the kind of posts we say we want.

In many ways, by curating, it's like we're choosing who to invite to our talk show and together we create a pretty big talk show.

But listen, while indeed we can invite anyone, the person invited has a louder voice all of a sudden.
Choosing wisely is good for us [ we we'd prefer to have very cool and interesting guests, don't we?] and also for our audience...it's really easy for them to change the channel. There are A LOT of channels out there.

[ curation test!! comment with a reference to Game of Thrones to prove you read it all!]

So what I see happens a lot is people upvoting without reading the article. They upvote based on the title and maybe photo thumbnail. The temptation is natural, I get it too! But let's make no mistakes here: IT'S LAZY. It's almost a theft! You want curation rewards but no actual curation? UGH.

And what I fear is that this type of behavior we'll turn our collective talk show from Q.I to.... Jerry Springer.
WE MUST BE Q.I!

The question is HOW do we improve the natural curation response of people.

I've seen a suggestion that we could activate the upvote button at the end of every post. That's not bad at all but it still encourages skimming.

Maybe we can have something that registers if you actually spent time on the post. But that again is easy to be beat and kind of creepy.

Maybe we can have a secret word embedded in every post and you need to write it when upvote. [ guess who tied that? ]

I've seen some posts about the fear of the bad type of content rearing its ugly head due to no curation and I share the fear. I want to share the optimism too!

The bottom line is this. IF we want to see less circlejerk type of content and more amazing content we need to curated in that direction, we need to encourage people to curate with intent and reward accordingly.

That's the technical part but the humane part from my point of view is this: You can encourage and do whatever you can for people to do a good job curating but you absolutely must have a core of people [ and that's a lot of people not a few ] that are interested in good content, that want more and that will drive the type of content that will rise to the top.

And with that...more good curators and creators will come. The snowball effect will be fast.

I can't wait to see this happening!