Hi @solar. First off thanks for the support you've recently shown me. I try to investigate good curators and try to see what they're about because I assume it's someone I can connect with who also cares about the platform.
Some of what you're talking about in your post here are issues that I've been brainstorming about lately as well. I'll share some of my ideas and thoughts.
As you mentioned the brand new user experience on Steemit is rough to say the least, and I think what you're doing is a good solution to help with that. My idea was to potentially try to make more people like you. Basically someone who has enough SP to at least move the needle a little who is actively curating on the platform.
I was thinking of maybe making a separate account and starting a curation trail that would support artists who are active, consistent contributors AND active curators. The difference between my curation trail and some others that exist though are that instead of focusing on new talent we would focus on rewarding consistency. So that these users could serve as a foundation to build the art community.
The idea is still a work in progress, but where I'm at now is I'm thinking, we'd have something like a whitelist that artists can apply for. We'd review their posts and their curation history and based on that accept or reject them. After they'd been accepted, the curation trail would upvote ALL of their art related posts, serving as a bit of a baseline for people that have a proven track record of delivering and curating quality content.
As long as these users continue to do what they're doing they will stay on the whitelist until they hit some upper threshold of SP, at which point, the hope would be that they just continue to curate, but now with more power.
I'm thinking the trail would support x number of artists until it's voting power hits y value that I'd have to work out, and after it exceeds a certain value it would have an opening for a new applicant to apply. This (if this idea went anywhere) would also incentivise users to curate as well as create which I think is important, if they wanted to be added when there was a new opening.
That's where things are at now, would love to hear if you have an opinion, even if it's that it's a terrible idea, I'd rather poke holes in it now before I start to take real steps to make it happen. I think it's awesome what you're doing btw!
Yeah I i think it's on the right track. If you keep it to certain types of parameters there will probably be delegation support for it. I've been telling people for a while if they make good posts and are consistent they will do well over time. But steem is a big time commitment, it takes time. It's really more of a "Proof of LaborTime" algo, mixed in with pay to play, and touch of god syndrome (my post got upvoted by a whale!). I'm interested in doing a combination first and second level filtering, and finding ways to pay curators more. There are some successful projects that have started in this sort of way but it seems like many of these types of projects stall out, and I wonder why that is (the other steem browsers).
Ultimately I'd like to build something that is a foundation for connecting artists to the world in new ways. If decentralized media can take off, it will be a huge step. The monetary distribution on steem isn't encouraging though.
you know utopian.io they are doing some great things.