Since Steemit began, there have been complaints that the supply of STEEM has been too centralized into the hands of too few people. It is not my place to judge whether this was the result of a questionable design or simply the pre-cursor to a long distribution phase. What was clear, a few months ago, was that the rewards were not being redistributed quickly enough to a broad enough base of users; Steemit was growing more quickly than the Steem could be re-distributed.
A Short History of Curation on Steemit
Aside from the highlight/spotlight newsletters that some of us started, Tombstone and Smooth began the first curation responses to this problem. They had some very good people involved in finding worthy posts to reward. Unfortunately, the STEEM price began to fall, perhaps those models were too intensive to maintain, and for whatever reason those curation projects were not continued. Some of Team Smooth’s best curators went on to form the Robin Hood Whale initiative which also has had success in directing attention to deserving posts that otherwise would not receive good rewards. I could name several other great efforts that others have started also; all of us are aiming for similar objectives.
Next came the two curation projects started by Steemit writers: Project Curie and Steem Guild. Project Curie was founded to help discover, screen, recognize, and reward the best posts from undiscovered authors. It was founded with the voting power of @nextgencrypto , who shared the vision and has supported the project from Day 1. Since then, several additional whale accounts have donated their voting power to help Curie spread daily rewards to more than 100 posts per day. Last week, for example, their voting power enabled Curie to reward 793 posts from 483 unique authors, representing roughly 25% of all active users. @nextgencrypto @berniesanders @pharesim @val @silversteem @clayop @kushed and others deserve our thanks for donating some voting power to help reward deserving authors. Also, @smooth @riverhead @charlieshrem and others have followed @curie’s votes at various times. I have donated my own voting power from @donkeypong to the project also.
More recently, Steem Guild joined the party, anchored by the votes of @ned . An entirely new group of curators and reviewers have been trained in to create this second-stage project that focuses on continuing to reward worthy authors who are no longer eligible for Curie, but who continue to produce great content. They still need help getting established and Steem Guild provides a bridge for this. In addition, Steem Guild is able to support and develop additional areas of focus that are difficult for Curie to cover. These include science/technology (thanks to Val’s vision), photography (which is split between the two projects without overlap), and certain foreign languages for which the project has trusted teams of curators/reviewers and clear guidelines in place.
The Positive Impacts
These two projects have succeeded in vastly broadening the rewards base to many deserving authors and content creators. Nearly 7,000 votes later, the positive impact on Steemit has been clear. We have moved away from the days when a small handful of authors earned most of the daily rewards on Steemit. In a typical 24 hour period now, Project Curie and Steem Guild make 200-230 combined votes on great posts by unique authors. Most of them earn $15-35 per post via project upvotes, depending on available voting power and the present value of Steem.
Instead of one post earning $4,000, there are 200 posts earning $20 or more. That represents a huge broadening of the rewards base. And from a business perspective, that helps tremendously with user retention and engagement.
The content on the site is more diverse than it has ever been. Topics that were ignored before are thriving now. Redistribution of STEEM is reaching more people than ever before. And the quality of posts on the site has improved greatly, thanks both to intensive curation and to the great work of projects like SteemCleaners. Also, there are many wonderful individuals who dedicate time each day to finding and upvoting good content as well as flagging any content that is spammy, hateful, or plagiarized. Independent curators have taken on larger roles also, replacing many of the bots with real people who provide a human touch.
The curation efforts have been wildly successful so far and they are just getting started. We hope that other projects will form in this space and that other whales and accountholders will delegate voting power to curation projects. Hopefully, when Steemit formalizes voting guilds, there will be additional curation efforts that adhere to the same high standard of quality that Curie and Steem Guild demand.
Economics and Growing Pains
All is not perfect in Curationland, of course, and that is one reason I have written this post. The low price of Steem creates challenges for many people, and the curation projects are not immune to these effects either. For one thing, a low STEEM price keeps curation rewards relatively low, so we really need to thank the whales who support curation efforts. It is a donation of voting power for the most part, and some whales still donate STEEM or SBD to the project from those rewards they receive.
You have seen the daily and weekly update posts from @curie . We started the daily posts to provide transparency about which posts are getting rewarded. I love looking through those posts after the votes to see how much great, original content is being recognized. Steem Guild does not publish such a list because it focuses more on good authors (largely, Curie graduates) than posts, which results in a much less expensive operation. Steem Guild will always contribute money back to Curie because Curie does the difficult screening work of these authors.
The @curie posts have provided a means of income for supporting the #curie channel while also helping with the cost of primary curation. In addition, members of the Curie team also donate a great deal of STEEM and SBD from our own posts to support the cost of primary curation (which includes discovering posts, screening them for plagiarism, etc., and reviewing them again before they are upvoted).
In an ideal world, Curie’s curation is a full-time job across three teams covering 24/7 shifts in the Americas, Europe/Africa and Asia time zones. Someday, we would love to have three members per team: one person screening posts, a second curating, and a third reviewing and upvoting those posts. We do not have the budget to cover this, but have a great team of curators + reviewers in different time zones and nearly 24/7 coverage in the #curie channel.
The project’s costs also include:
• Finder’s fees for Curie curators and compensation for #curie channel moderators
• Development of software required for our operations
• Running witness nodes for proper functioning of these bots/scripts
• Accounting and operations
• Buying and powering up proxy accounts for voting purposes
The low Steem price means that Project Curie is sucking out a lot of daily rewards from Steemit via these posts. At the moment, this amount is higher than I am comfortable with; I would prefer if we could space out the posts more widely and not interfere with the Trending page as much. This situation is temporary until one of two things happens: (1) the price of Steem goes up, or (2) Steemit formally introduces the voting guilds. Either of these could change the financial calculation and (hopefully) eliminate the current necessity for such frequent and trending @curie posts.
The rewards from those daily and weekly posts go to support the #curie channel on Steemit.chat as well as to support operations. We have some great moderators on #curie and it has been wonderful to involve other members of the community by paying out finders fees for the deserving posts they find and submit to the #curie channel. Having fewer @curie posts would mean cutting back this channel and eliminating the finders fees for community members.
What will happen to Project Curie if the Steem price falls much lower? As much as we love the #curie channel and love having that connection to the community, it is very expensive for the project to maintain. If the price of Steem falls further, the project will have little choice but to eliminate finders’ fees and to limit moderator participation in the channel. Frankly, the majority of curated posts come not from the channel but from the efforts of our project’s own curators. Internal curation is cheaper, so directing resources towards primary curation would be the most efficient use of the project’s resources. We have been working hard to limit those curation costs as well.
Over the last week, out of more than 1,400 votes from Project Curie and Steem Guild, I was contacted only twice by SteemCleaners about possible votes on plagiarized posts. You can contrast that with one of the other whale accounts who makes votes manually and, on average, is contacted by SteemCleaners five times per day (that’s 35 times per week on average) to ask for his votes to be removed from plagiarized posts. That is the difference when one lacks the resources to screen each post fully; it essentially shifts the burden of assuring quality to other projects and individuals who also need to be supported separately by the community.
Maintaining high standards for manual curation is intensive and it is not cheap. No one working on either Project Curie or Steem Guild is getting rich. I have spent some of my own money getting these projects running, not to mention hundreds of hours of hard work, and almost all liquid rewards I have made on my own posts goes back into the projects or to pay others who are working hard on them. All of us are writers ourselves and we have sacrificed writing opportunities (which would have been more financially rewarding) to spend many hours helping with intensive curation.
Positioning Steemit for a Bright Future
We do this work because we care about making a better Steemit platform with high quality, original content from diverse authors. And in doing so, the projects also are assisting greatly with STEEM’s redistribution to the masses as well as with retention. These curation projects are imperfect, but they are an important beginning for the curation guilds which will be formalized on Steemit in coming months.
I hope this post has given the community a better understanding of the economics of curation and how these projects work. As always, the projects’ staff members and I are available to answer any questions you may have. If we sometimes seem absent on the site, it is only because we have our noses in the posts and are trying to find more great authors to reward. We see a very bright future ahead for both STEEM and Steemit! –Yours truly, Tom @donkeypong
I’d like to thank several other members of Curie and Steem Guild for assisting me with this post. @liberosist @hanshotfirst @steemship @kevinwong and @the-alien each provided valuable help with this one.
All images are public domain via Pixabay.