Change
If there is one thing in life that is a constant, it is that things are ever changing. Crypto as a whole and STEEM specifically are certainly not of exception to the phenomenon of change. Prices fluctuate and active user-ship waxes and wanes along with broad market movements. Dealing with change, is a part of growing an organization or a community. The successful will be those who are flexible, nimble, able to adapt to what ever the world throws at them.
SteemSTEM looks to be that way, and we feel that we have a community that welcomes changes, while still keeping our eyes pointing forward. We have all witnessed the recent decline in the value of STEEM, and we are sure you all also see the declining number of content creators on the Steem blockchain. Good times will surely return again, but in the meantime we must adapt.
Ideas that were effective in the past may not work in the current climate. However the reverse is also true, things that were infeasible before may now become viable paths forward.
Today's weekly update will neither focus on the here and now, nor on recent developments (they are plentiful as for instance the development on steemstem.io continues). We instead look to use this update blog as a call for community input on all project-related issues recently raised on our discord server.
We also present, for the first time, some proposed solutions and directions which we came up with. Whilst nothing of this has been implemented yet, the outcome and reactions to this blog are crucial to help us in setting priorities and finalizing what we should do.
Curation
The first area of concern involves content curation and transparency of how posts are voted upon. In discussions with a small number of community members, it was made known that it is not the reward size that community members are unhappy with. Instead, it is lack of clarity around what defines the strength of a curated posts vote.
While writing such reports takes time and energy, the amount of posts being currently supported is small. As a result curators have more free time, relatively to even 6 months prior. Therefore, we may have a way to correct this, by asking curators to work more... with some fun in return.
Here is our proposal:
- [1] Curators will get a new task: write a curation report for any post upvoted more than 50%, explaining why this post is a good post and the reasons behind the strong upvote.
- [2] An algorithm will be designed by our one-man development team to track automatically those reports and assign them a score (on the basis of the level of details given in the report).
- [3] The reports and scores will then be reviewed manually for a confirmation, manual curation being always yielding greater accuracy, by someone to whom this role will be assigned.
- [4] The reports will be upvoted, as they are valuable for the SteemSTEM community, once the score will be confirmed.
- [5] The best curator of the week will get a nice badge on his/her steemstem.io profile as well as an upvote-bonus for his/her own posts. Additionally, all-time tracking of these awards will also be maintained and made available on steemstem.io
Moreover, due to the low volume of posts, we remove the rule enforcing a single author to get less than 3% of all SteemSTEM upvotes of the last two weeks (let’s simply reward the people still with us during these dark times).
Engagement and Honor Members
We would also like to discuss engagement, or more specifically the lack of it. But before, let us focus on the SteemSTEM Honor Members a little bit. Honor Members are a class of trusted, motivated, high quality content creators who are symbolic of the very best of SteemSTEM.
Out of that group mentors were chosen, whom users (new and old) could ask for help on the construction of content that better fit within the SteemSTEM guidelines. Our Honor Members and Mentors selflessly help others to create better content, and do this not for the rewards but because they see the potential of what we are trying to accomplish. They see where this community can go!
In addition, a second subset of Honor Members were dedicated to track engagement and a third subset of them were focusing on dealing with the 'questions-and-complaints' room of our discord server.
However, the number of active users is in decline Steem wide, and with that the number of new content creators as well. So... a big part of the way that these respected community members were able to be involved, is just not currently available.
Rather than sitting around and waiting for what once was to return, we propose a new direction and offer Honor Members new options to work with. In short: let us reward the good users instead of punishing the ones lacking of engagement.
- [1] The Honour Members will be assigned the task of tracking and scoring the exemplary comments that are worthy to be rewarded. The information will be passed to our curation team for a SteemSTEM upvote.
- [2] Our one-man development team will design a script tracking all rewarded comments and get some rankings. The top commenters will get an upvote-bonus for some their posts and comments, as well as a nice badge on their steemstem.io profile. There will be 'levels' to these badges and continued efforts will allow a user to improve their badge rank (and get more rewards). An all-time tracking will also be put in place.
- [3] The Honour Members sub-categories will cease to exist. Every Honour Member will be asked to help how he/she can with the various missions.
- [4] Both Honour Members and curators could optionally write reports to posts upvoted below 50%, explaining what could be improved. Those reports will be reviewed and upvoted. This will count for the “best curator” reward contest above-mentioned.
This is where we stand for now. Feel free to let us know your thoughts. Are there things you would like to see added? How can we help you have more fun? Thank you for your feedback and shared opinions!
The SteemSTEM management and public relation teams!
Make sure to follow steemstem on steemstem.io, steemit, facebook, twitter, and instagram to always be up-to-date on our latest news and ideas. Please also consider to support the project by delegating to @steemstem for a ROI of 65% of our curation rewards (quick delegation links: 50SP | 100SP | 500SP | 1000SP | 5000SP | 10000SP).