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