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RE: An application for the @curie witness to be considered for the MSP witness vote
Thanks for applying. Question for you, How do you see the platform changing in the next five years that could hinder and aid your goals for the platform?
Kubby, I totally agree with what Mark and Carl have said here so I will try to add to what they've said rather than repeat it. There are definitely some key risks going forward since steemit is basically a big social experiment that is playing out in real time. I think most people are aware of the platform's current problems but future ones are much harder to predict (this goes for the entire crypto space, not just steemit). We also know that competition is coming and but at the moment, we don't know what that will look like. It could kill steemit, or it will force it to adapt and hopefully thrive. This makes looking out five years incredibly difficult. Curie cannot solve these fundamental problems, nor can MSP. What curie can and does do, is reward good behaviour using generous financial incentives. Curators and reviewers spend a lot of time seeking out and upvoting undervalued, exceptional content. If we can help keep the good, original content creators on the platform through decent rewards, this is a good thing. I'd argue this is not dissimilar to MSP (and the various projects that fall under it), whose goals are to keep people on the platform as well. Curie is also adaptable. Even in the short time I've been a curator, I've seen changes that make it easier to reward people, and I expect more will come as the platform continues to evolve. Like MSP, curie is run by people who care about the platform. We want to see it succeed despite not knowing how things are going are pan out in the medium-long run.
Thank you for your responses. I do have another thought about the group I would apperciate a response to if possible. You mentioned you don’t vote for any witness, what is the thought process or reasoning behind this decision?
Curie's mission is to serve the community as a community witness and a meritocratic community Curation project. Curie's main operations are focused around quality curation. Organization has a long standing policy of not voting on other witnesses from @curie account for the reasons of staying apolitical and unbiased. Any perceptions of bias or political decision making would just serve as a distraction from core operations of serving the community. Individual members/curators can vote as they please from their personal accounts. This policy was put in place to protect the integrity of the organization and its mission. At the same time any policy can be changed via voting process. At this time consesus is to keep the policy as is.
Perfect! I'd hate to be judged based on politics. 👍
Thanks for the question, it's a good one.
Personally speaking, I believe that the communities initiative is going to be a big gamechanger. I know that curie is aiming to adapt to this change positively by getting involved in the newly formed communities in a similar way to our current support of various sub-communities. Our discussions of what we would like to be involved in there are still in the early stages; the implementation of communities is still quite abstract for most of us so it's hard to know exactly what we can do at this point in time. However, I do believe that the communities project goals line up really well with the goals of curie, the main one being to help good content become more visible.
If the communities offering isn't as successful as everyone is hoping for it to be then it may well get harder and harder to find good quality posting in amongst all of the noise that we currently see an increase in. Filtering through that noise would require more curators spending more time doing what they do best, but as curie is already operating at a loss yet increasing the amount of curators we have, we would have to really re-enforce our efforts to gain delegation and support from elsewhere. With the current focus on apps and suchlike for delegation, we are aiming to get into that space and I am personally overseeing the development of a new curation platform on behalf of curie that will be available for any curation guilds to use for free. That is hopefully something that will not only aid our goals in obtaining delegation, but also aid other curation teams with an easy to use platform for managing their curation teams.
One problem I do see at the moment is that even with a curie upvote, it is hard to get authors as noticed as they should be. It is different to this time last year when I received my first curie upvote and got propelled onto the trending page. That just doesn't happen anymore. I personally hope that the trend of non-organic, bot induced author visibility can be reversed somewhat to allow curie and other manual curation groups to push the good quality content to the top of the pile.
Beyond communities, I find it hard to say what is going to happen in the next 5 years. I suspect there will be more competition in the blockchain social network space so we could end up with a drastically altered landscape in terms of user base with many people potentially moving away if the obvious problem areas here are not solved.
As a community witness operator, I have invited others to comment on this question as well; other members of curie should be given a chance to say what they think.
Thanks again for your question, I hope I answered it to your expectations.
Mark
Thank you for your thoughtful response. Also, thank you for takin over the serve duties with the curie group. It’s a big responsibility and stepping up to the challenge isn’t easy. If you could, please walk me through or explain curies stand on voting for other witness.
Wow five years is a really long time scale for a platform like Steem. The realistic answer is that if Steem is still around and going strong in five years, there will likely have been such major changes at both hardfork and front end level that it will hardly be recognizable, and if there is a person alive today that knows what those changes are going to be they have psychic powers and can see the future. Although I am an alien eyeball, my extra-sensory perception just allows me to read people's surface thoughts in the present.
Curie has and will continue to adapt guidelines and operations to the changing nature of the Steem platform. For instance, Curie used to have an upper REP limit of REP 52 for authors rewarded through normal curator/reviewer operations. As the platform aged and more authors graduated out of that REP range, a common criticism of Curie was that it was boosting authors up to REP 52 and then basically abandoning them. So, Curie changed. We eliminated the upper REP guideline. This is an example of how Curie will adapt to changing conditions on Steem platform, while keeping its core mission intact of discovering and supporting engaged authors who are posting without reward. It is in fact often the case that users can reach even REP in the 60's and still not be receiving major regular reward, and still be a "minnow" by SP definition.
Curie upvotes Jan. 2018 - April 2018
When it comes to specific issues, some of the answer to this gets into "political" territory which Curie tries hard to avoid. For instance, Curie will not take a public stance on pay for votes, but that is obviously (to me personally) the single biggest issue facing the platform and one that will have to be resolved in one way or another for the platform to survive. If the current trends continue and an ever increasing amount of total SP is delegated to vote sellers, it will simultaneously dilute Curie's effectiveness (and the effectiveness of any other non-vote selling/buying entity) and make Curie's mission of even more critical importance. New authors are faced with an ugly reality when onboarding today - they are confronted with a pay-to-play platform and the perception that if they do not boost their posting by paying for votes, they cannot ever get established. "Proof-of-brain" is rapidly becoming a myth, a faint memory. So while the relative worth of the Curie upvote will continue to shrink if current vote-selling trends continue, the work put in by Curie curators to find and reward engaged minnow authors who are posting quality original content without reward is going to be even more vitally important to the platform. I would hope that the community at large and the Minnow Support Project in particular sees the value in that, both now and especially in a hypothetical future where these trends have continued and worsened.
Thank you for your responses. I understand the struggle to see a future with a somewhat unstable platform. If you could, respond to the following question. Curie doesn’t currently vote for any witness, what is the thought process or reasoning behind this decision?
Hello again :) This is covered under the heading "What is Curie pledging to do to support the Minnow Support Project?" in the post above and falls under one of the guiding tenets of the Curie organization, which is to be apolitical. So to answer this question, I will first expand briefly on my own understanding of why Curie is an apolitical organization.
The primary goals of Curie are to discover & support engaged & exceptional content creators, and to empower quality curators on Steem blockchain. From its founding, Curie has been apolitical to allow the focus to be on these primary goals. This is why the only three categories of posting that Curie does not support are religious, political and Steemit related. Content creation and curation cuts across political, religious and platform-specific issues. It is easy to imagine (and in fact you don't have to imagine, you can just look around for examples of this happening every day) high-stake indviduals flagging and otherwise opposing efforts from a group or individual because of disagreement on a public political or platform-related stance. This can and does happen even if the actual post getting flagged has nothing at all to do with the issue of disagreement. If Curie came down on one side or another of a contentious political or platform-related issue, it would almost certainly result in retaliatory flagging and other attacks on authors and posting that Curie supports. The focus is on rewarding and empowering authors and curators, and Curie feels that maintaining a neutral, apolitical stance on these issues is vitally important to allow its primary missions to succeed.
To bring this back to the original question, perhaps it is not as self-explanatory as I think it is why voting for other witnesses is a political decision (and thus, not something Curie is going to do). If you have ever lobbied for witness votes yourself (and I think the word lobby is the most appropriate descriptor here), you probably already know that voting for other witnesses, among top witnesses, is absolutely a political game. The status quo is "I will vote for you if you vote for me". The status quo is "let us collude to remove votes from Witness X, who does not support me with a vote, and instead move our votes to Witness Y, who will then support both of us with a vote."
To be 100% clear - Curie hopes that any votes cast for Curie for witness are cast based on the merits of Curie. If you believe Curie provides as much or more value to the platform as the witnesses currently in the top 30, we would hope that you would cast one of your 30 votes for Curie. Curie will not now and will not ever do a "vote exchange" with another witness, so the political ramifications of witness voting are not in play. Any major stakeholder voting for Curie is free to vote purely on merit without worrying about what other witnesses are voting for Curie, without worrying if a vote for Curie will result in angering a different bloc of witnesses.
Cheers - Carl
Thank you all for taking the time to answer all my questions.
Hey since Mark posted this application, Curie has released the beta version of a curation tool / filtering search tool for Steem blockchain :) Please pass this on to the MSP admin team for review - there has been no official anouncement from Curie blog on this front as this is still very early beta. More functionality and a cosmetic face lift / better UX are coming. https://steemlookup.com The source code for the filtering tool has also been made available as open source code here: https://github.com/steemlookup/steemlookup
Cheers - Carl