As at the time of putting this post together, the stemsocial community has 984 subscribers with 95 active posters. There is no doubt the community is growing at a steady pace. However, not every user posting into the community gets support/upvote from the stemsocial account. This has led to a variety of misconceptions about the community with some going as far as calling us 'circle jerkers'.
The stemsocial community has been around as steemstem on the former blockchain. We are one of the oldest and consistent curation projects on the hive blockchain primarily dedicated to projecting hive to the outside world by supporting STEM contents anywhere they are found on the blockchain. While STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics; we have extended our support to include other subjects such as Psychology, Architecture, History, etc. However, the posts that will earn our support must fulfill certain standards in order to ensure that only quality is rewarded.
Authors who have been around on the chain for a while already know what is required for their articles to get curated by stemsocial because the guidelines have been well spelled out in the past. It may then seems like only these authors consistently get curated by us because others kind of fall short of our requirements somehow. Hence, the need for this post.
Minimum requirements to get curated by stemsocial
Writing a good stem article requires hard work and dedication. Veteran authors will tell you that they sometimes spend days trying to research before eventually coming up with some of the good (and probably well rewarded) stem posts we see on the chain. However, your posts do not have to be good in order to get noticed by our curators, they only need to be decent and meet our minimum requirements. The minimum requirements include:
- Originality: A decent, curation-worthy stem article must be original. While paraphrasing with original thoughts is allowed, rewording someone else's work without any original input is considered plagiarism, and copying/pasting another person's article is simply criminal. If you must copy any information from another person's work verbatim, the quote function should be used and the source appended accordingly.
- Clear Language: The essence of writing is to communicate. Hence, whatever language you are using to compose your article must be clear and easily understood by your readers. Currently, the stemsocial community supports English, German, French, Spanish, and Chinese language. Always write in a language you are comfortable with.
- Formatting: A well-formatted article would be easier to read. Hence, proper formatting remains one of the key requirements in order to get our support. An original, clearly-written article with poor formatting would be difficult to read. Aesthetically formatted articles always appeal to readers. A lesson in markdown styling would help in crafting well-formatted articles.
- Referencing: Always include references in your article - be it in-text citation or as a list at the end of the article. If you write everything based on your ideas and thoughts, always include resource materials to consult in case your readers wish to explore further on the topic.
- Copyrights: Curation-worthy stem articles must not infringe on any copyright law - be it in the texts or the images used in the article. A comprehensive guide on copyright standards has been published before and all you need to know can be found in the article.
Going beyond the minimum requirements
A well rewarded and engaging article would need to go beyond the minimum requirements. Fulfilling just the basic requirements will most likely get you noticed by the community curators. However, personalizing your articles and sprinkling them with as much creativity as possible would go a long way in making your articles interesting to readers, fetching you enough engagement and support.
Voting strengths
Depending on the volume, level of information, and the level of originality of articles; the amount of support given in terms of voting strength from the stemsocial account varies.
- 10% is for low-volume articles that meet minimum curation requirements.
- 30% is for medium to high-volume articles that are informative and meet the curation requirements.
- 65% is for medium to high-volume articles that are well researched, informative, creative, and of course, do not fall short of the curation requirements.
- 100% is for original research carried out following the scientific method and published on the chain.
In addition to the above, there is an extra 5% for articles posted through the stemsocial platfort and another 5% for making stemsocial a beneficiary.
Moving forward
We hope with this clarification, the misconceptions about the community can be laid to rest. Anyone is eligible to be curated by stemsocial as long as they meet the curation guideline. This is as against the notion that the community only curate some set of people and ignore others, aka, circle-jerking.
I addition to that, we have a team of Honor members that are ready to help out newbies within the community in order to ensure that they get a grip on our curation guidelines. All that the users need to do is visit our Discord server and request for mentorship or directly message any member whose username is highlighted in green color.
If you need further clarification, feel free to leave a comment on this article, ask in the general channel of our discord server or dm me on discord (gentleshaid#1143).
To the moon!