Upvoting is not curation! So I want to manually solve curation for my own purposes...

in #curation7 years ago (edited)

Currently Steemit feels like an endless stream of rubber duckies that try to look cool but which move too fast to see closely...

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Why upvoting is NOT curation

Curation is still not well understood on Steemit.
Many people that are called curators, focus on up-voteable content, because that is what is rewarded.
Sadly the amount of upvotes does not provide a good signal to find worthwhile posts.
It might be the post was upvoted because of pile on effects, established authors, succesful whale hunting, ...
Even if the upvotes reflect a high quality post, it does not give any signal on what area of interest it is about.
For me as an individual, a 500 USD post that is well written about butterflies, still does not float my boat.
Not relevant to ME ... sorry! Most upvoting lacks FOCUS on a particular theme or topic.
Even the tagging system is not sufficient to reliably find the top content that YOU are interested in.

focus.jpg

Irrelevant? Moi?

With the explosive growth of Steemit.com comes a diversification of interests. That in itself is healthy but the inadequacy of the feed systems generate too many "irrelevant" posts. Of course "irrelevant" is highly personal.
We all have different interests, goals and time constraints, so our criteria are different.
Note that irrelevant posts are not necessarily bad posts, but not relevant to the topics I am are interested in.

Too much information equals NO information.

Ideally I want to develop a way to easily find posts that are interesting to my criteria:

  • well written (edited, formatted and structured)
  • are original ideas related to the idea economy topics (see below)
  • go in-depth a (not your standard "7 reasons" clickbait)
  • expose me to new ideas around themes that interest me (psyhology, economy, creativity, steemit and it's many potential applications see topics)

What is content curation?

Why do it yourself if someone else did it better? Found this on : http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition:
They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.
Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation. Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant resources on a very specific topic or theme...

The value of content curation

Good curation is about filtering, and discriminating against anything that is not relevant.
Basically it is building a relationship with your audience: you commit to present content that is WORTH THEIR TIME.

Once you fail to provide this filtering, offering stuff that simply does not interest your audience, you lose part of that trust, because you are not a useful curator anymore.

Evergreen content

What is relevant to read should NOT have ANYTHING to do with WHEN it was posted. The problem with steemit is that quality content simply drowns in the feeds and even favorite posts from authors, are disappearing in the abyss.

So we need a roadmap in the absence of a good filter mechanism, (I hope very much that this is fixed in the Alpha version of Steemit, I think it is the biggest problem currently) .

Manually fixing curation for my own purposes: 5 Steps I will take

Beth showed this graph on her blog which I think makes a lot of sense:

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My curation goal: Explain how to adapt to the idea economy

My main theme and sfere of interest can be defined as anything around adapting to the idea-economy.
To do that it will explore what "Future survival skills" a professional needs to develop to achieve a succesful transition to an idea-economy career or business.
I will try to find illuminating case studies that highlight real life or potentially inspiring future models

I will try to curate EVERGREEN CONTENT that is relevant to anyone trying to solve specific problems around
my framework of adapting to the new IDEA ECONOMY.

First priority is to find authors and posts on Steemit.com AROUND THIS THEME.
The goal is to build a reference library Authors, posts, books, youtube videos, steemit book reviews.

Topics

Idea-economy general concepts: What is going on and why do we need to adapt?

Explaining specifically why are things changing.
Why Steemit is an implementation of an idea economy.
Explaining the core economic concepts behind the idea economy and material on how to interpret these new paradigms.
Topics might include:

  • Abundance, new technology and its implications, new social organisations,
  • economy and new concepts, steemit economic initiatives and development
  • Futurism, technology and examples of abundance created through technology
  • social topics, collaboration
  • steemit economic behaviour

Specific actions you can take to adapt to these changes and develop new skills

psychology, (self) education, techno literacy, Future survival skills.

Examples of adaptation

Real life case studies or ideas around the idea economy, steemit applications and use cases that build on the above ideas.
This will take longer to develop but should document concrete actions a person can take to better adapt to the idea economy.
First of all there are future survival skills. Things that will be more and more needed in the near future and which we are

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Promoting Steemit.com

Obviously the primary goal is to create a specific community around this theme on Steemit.com
This content curation project is meant to discover new (and old) Steemit Authors.
So mainly sources quoted will be posts here on steemit.com

External resources: (books, youtube, external blogs)

There are of course tons of resources that are very useful. If no Steemit sources available a standard library will be made.
Ideally over time we can swap out the links with book reviews and posts by Steemians.

Sense making

Jigsaw_puzzle_01_by_Scouten.jpg

Just dumping a whole bunch of links is not curation either. Good curation is about showing context, where does this information fit in the puzzle?
So to avoid wasting YOUR time, a curator should explain briefly WHY YOU SHOULD read it.
Each person has different requirements.
So before clicking on a link there should be an explanation WHY you should click the link. This is the second condition for good curation that is not satisfied with the current feed and upvoting system.

Some authors are interesting, no matter what they write about. But their topics are not necessarily relevant to the goal of this curation post. To keep interesting authors visible I will add a list of authors and commenters who have made relevant contributions. These authors might make you think, craft their posts and are just fun to read no matter what the topic.
The intention is to foster the exploration or recreational reading of other authors who put in the effort.
The author list will also include a brief explanation WHY you should read them.

Sharing

Knowledge-sharing.jpg

The main advantage will come from collaboration, various people contributing and exchanging information helps a lot to discover new original content. One person will have an individual filter, but several people will puzzle together a much more interesting mosaic of information.

In the absence of an automated solution, I will experiment with a manually updated weekly post.
The steemit reward structure currently only rewards content less than 7 days old. This is a strong disincentive to keep looking at "old" content.
The curation post post is open to anyone to add their own content or other's content through the comments.
To reward authors for useful contributions, readers of the curation post are invited to upvote the comments when people recommend good content (please check before voting).

Even if authors recommend their own post, they add value and should be rewarded IF the posts are relevant to the curation goal of course.
If you find the recommended posts are a waste of time, please DOWNVOTE the comment and EXPLAIN why this content is not valuable to the curation goal.
This way we can generate a true community curation effect as intented.

But it will be curated! Meaning that only posts that are worthwhile (length, quality of writing, clarity and relevance of ideas) will be included in the masterpost . owever if you write about adjacent topics, you are more than welcome to point out relevant posts of your OWN.

Any suggestions? Please put suggestions in the list below as a reply and I will consider them for inclusion in the ground rules.

If you think this is a good idea, I HIGHLY recommend that you define your own curation goal and start high quality curation yourself!

SBD's EARNED BY THE CURATION POST WILL BE SHARED :
I messed up, 100% powerup was selected.
I will guarantee 2 3 SBD prizes

1 winner for best post or author suggestion
1 winner for best re-steem (must explain why you resteemed)


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What else am I missing with this article, agree? Don’t agree? Have suggestions?
I would love to have your comment, maybe you can win some decent money. Anything thought provoking is great. Disagree, fantastic! Let me know! Have a question? Even better, a great question is sometimes better than a page long comment!

So please comment, question, challenge and RESTEEM to get as many people in the conversation as possible.

Sort:  

Like you say, every one of us has different interests and attention span to actually seek out knowledge that is relevant to us. People might not want to migrate from Facebook to Steemit simply because the way content is organized is just not efficient. I'm hoping to see Steemit evolve into a platform where users create and share information more organically rather than the resteeming or spamming blog posts to make money.

This is the largest hurdle I think Steemit has to rectify in the alpha version.

xD great analogy with the rubber ducks. I agree and have noticed since I started using steemit. Upvoting is not curation at all. Resteeming is closer to curation but you don't get rewarded by doing it. Good content is too disorganized and gets burried under lots of irrelevant content. I hope developers acknowledge these issues and address them in the next hardforks.

Good point about resteeming. I have some issues around resteeming because it makes the feed even more messier. With the curated library post, it is in effect a mass resteem of old content of I guess. The resteem is only useful for "new" content . With the library post I can give more context WHY I am mentioning it and why it is useful to read it. Not everything is useful to everyone, and a resteem is a pretty generic push to everyone without explanation...

Again@the-traveller, you are to me a beacon of light with your words. I first commented on your post 15 days ago which was 10 days after I first arrived on Steemit. Now I am following up to let you know I am still with you. I do want to be a curator, still learning as well and reminding myself to be patient, My arena (in which I picture myself curating as those in the museum do it) is poetry storytelling, and art - whether that be painting or photography. I want to cherry pick the best quality content that tells a story, conveys beauty, touches hearts and causes the reader to feel something like inspiration, revelation, or read or see a picture and their first thought is, 'I get that.' I choose this type of curation because of the life I have lived and what helps me to soar and grow and be happy in life are the things I just described and I know that there are others that need these things as well. This is what I want to share with my community and I want that community to grow to include some collaboration, trade and bartering so that we can prepare for what's ahead. I am a do for self type of girl and If we are to survive and prepare the way that those that will come after we must be self empowered and collaborative with others simultaneously.

Sounds like a great curation goal! I'd highly encourage you to go for it! You can add a lot of value to your readers. Don't be afraid to strictly filter and take a stand on what goes on your list.
You should be an arbiter of good taste, that is highly subjective and personal, it should not become bland and generic.
If people don't agree they can simply fork your curation list and take it further to their own taste ( properly mentioning you as an original source of course)

Thank you for this detailed comment. I will be curating under poeticimpact. starting in about a week.

excellent, please leave a link here and I will mention it on future library posts to get you some exposure!

Oh my goodness, I was just about to write a post asking how to find quality content on here!

My first impression over the last week is that this site is painfully disorganized. I'd like a better way to filter search results at least.

Everyone plops their own posts under 5 often generic tags, but maybe users could be allowed to assign labels to others' content. That way, feeds could be filtered on richer keywords.

For example, you could see someone's Futurism feed including original posts and resteems that that user labeled Futurism. You could even follow this user's Futurism feed if you have no interest in, say, all their posts about Parenthood.

A tagging hierarchy might be useful too. Travel posts can include any number of sub-categories, so any post in Budget Travel would be included in its parent category.

I'm personally looking for good storytelling of any kind - suggestions are welcome!

Also, I realize I just wrote a wishlist for the site in general, because I'm still trying to figure out how we can apply these principles as users, haha. Thoughtful, keyword-based curation posts is the best I've got right now.

Tags are part of the solution but a human opinion on WHY the post is useful might be more helpful.
Tags still do not help you filter quality evergreen posts. This kind of post might get out of hand quick so it might need to be split up in sub posts...

I agree, and I think your post covered that well! Tags are only the first step for discovering something new that you might be interested in. I think the personal library idea is great, especially as something you can pin in your bio.

Yes it would be great if everyone had their "hall of fame" of pinned posts.
That way you can find it easily and others looking at your profile can see what you recommend. Maybe someone can make an app that does this automatically through comments and most frequently followed authors.

One thing I was going to suggest is using a specific tag, but I noticed you are already using "idea-economy".

The reason I was going to suggest that is because when I posted a few wine articles a little while ago, @thewineman suggested I used the "steempub" hashtag for those posts.

Speaking of him suggesting using that tag, the other thing that could be done is; If you spot an article that is idea economy related? Drop the author a comment suggesting the use of the "idea-economy" tag in the article or any future articles on that topic.

We can then follow "idea-economy" and see all that is being posted relating to the topic.

great suggestion! I think specific tagging campaigns can be helpful. For starting topics it is a drop in the ocean but long term, if we can make a kind of loosely allied writers syndicate it might help a lot.

Yes that's a great point!

It might take a bit longer to get the hashtag going, but if it is supported by people upvoting and/or resteeming good posts using that tag, that will provide incentive.

I agree, when I start curating in a wee or so, I will use a tag that I have already started using for my writings , so that when I introduce it there will already be a stream of post to follow.

I like the idea of a loosely allied writers syndicate or tribe. I had an idea for social tribe once and what I envisioned was people joining that one tribe which was like the umbrella and once they join they align with like minded others in sub groups that is all about what they are about and even though there are different interest divided into groups there ultimate focus and goal is one and the same which is the one goal and focus of that tribe/syndicate.

I agree that curation is a bit gack. Personally I find 80-90% of the hot and trending posts to be worthless to me, clearly they are worthwhile to the authors and upvoters, but that doesn't help me find content I'm interested in. I mostly prefer posts relating to art and music and other creative endeavours and I try to resteem these the most, but my follower count is so small that my resteems are fairly useless, I almost just use it as a way to remember what posts I enjoyed.

Another point I agree with is the problem of the seven day lifespan of posts. I wish there was some way to still give older posts value because occasionally I stumble upon something that I would like to reward but it's over seven days old.

Now, onto the things I'm confused about. What exactly is it that you are looking for? I mean, you mention the idea economy and go on to suggest topics to do with economics, technology and steem/steemit, am I to assume this is another attempt at curating only those topics? Because I think steemit is already saturated with those topics and I don't think it helps new people coming here from different areas in life, I mean, if I'm a games reviewer or a journalist, or just an average person looking to try something new, I would quickly become bored with the site due to a lack of content that doesn't revolve around steemit, cryptocurrencies, and mundane "how to write a better blog" posts. What I'm trying to get at is, I would like to get my friends on steemit but currently they are not going to like it because there is nothing here that interests thtem, and anything they might post is going to be lost to the ether because it's not got to do with the topics mentioned above.

Anyway, that's just my opinion, I'm sorry it's so long. I mean, clearly this isn't going to be the solution I'm looking for, for my own tastes at least. Anyway, I wish you luck, and I'll keep an eye out to see how this progresses. And, again, I'm sorry about the length of this reply.

Good post..interestingly though, I think the most popular topic on steemit is photography

You have a point, it is one of the most popular tags, definitely, but it's being over used on things that I wouldn't really call photography. But just because a tag is popular doesn't mean the topic is popular. I just had a quick look at the hot posts, I scrolled the page down twice, and there are maybe five or six things I'm interested in and maybe one or two that I'll probably upvote, and that's the best it's been in I don't know how long, and not one of them is to do with photography. But I'm just a picky bastard, I have very specific tastes and they'll never be met by hot/trending topics on any website, it's not just steemit I have this problem with, haha.

You'd think steemit would have a google type search bar or something to help with keyword search on the site.

Well there is a search function, powered by google too, but it's not the best.

A way you can help give value to an old post is by making an engaging comment for the author to reply to, and upvote the comment they reply on. Or, upvote a similar topic of theirs. I was actually just thinking about that today and I think that would be the best way. Even going as far to say "Please reply to my comment because your post is no longer within the upvoting time, so that I can give you an upvote." OR SOMETHING. But that's one way you can still contribute to that post specifically.

This is something I've considered as well. I just wasn't sure if comment rewards were tied to post rewards or not, as in once the post pays out the comments no longer pay out. I also considered upvoting more recent posts telling the author that I'm upvoting because of an older post and giving a link to the older post.

I suppose there are ways around the seven day limit.

I think that it only counts for comments that are also older than 7 days old. I don't think it would let you upvote if a new comment on the post wouldn't be pay-out-able.

I think you can still upvote posts that are older than seven days old, so I don't see why it wouldn't let you vote for a comment even though it won't pay out. I'm probably wrong, though, I still don't quite understand how everything works here, haha.

Have you tried upvoting something older than 7 days? I haven't in a while, but I think it gave me an error message. Haha I don't quite remember.

I think when I first started I upvoted an older post, but I can't remember.

I think it does not earn anything after 7 days. I was thinking about a way around that. If I'd leave a comment on the "old post" and the author responds to that, the comment itself CAN still earn since it would be younger than 7 days. So people who re-discover the author could sill support them!

That is Genius.

Regarding your questions this post might explain better what my personal curation goal is and how my personal filter works;
https://steemit.com/curation/@the-traveller/upvoting-is-not-curation-so-i-want-to-manually-solve-curation-for-my-own-purposes

Did you mean to link to this post: https://steemit.com/idea-economy/@the-traveller/idea-economy-curated-library-post

I've read through it and it seems it's just yet another place I don't really fit in, haha. Thanks anyway. I'll be sure to keep an eye on what you're sharing in the future, I might find something of interest.

Hehe that is unfortunately the flipside of curation. Can't please everyone. I'd highly encourage you to make your own version I d be happy to mention it in the weekly library posts...

I think I'll have to try that once I have enough followers that engage with my posts to suggest things I'll enjoy. For now though, I guess I'll just have to keep doing it the hard way, haha.

Don't underesrimate how much followers it can generate for you. I'd start soon. If you have evernote it is easy just clip it to evernote under a specifuc tag once a week and copy paste et voilá!

I'll have to look into it.

Excellent article. I like your term "idea economy". I try to keep all of my original posts and curation under the heading of "what creates more care, compassion, and truth in the world?" It's like running a magazine, so to speak. All of us are here on the Steemit newstand holding up our latest edition, going "Extra, extra, read all about it!"

I love it here!

I like the magazine concept, that is in effect what it is... Where can I find yours?
Happy to mention it in my curated library post.

Yay, I seriously appreciate that! I am @creationofcare

Do you have such a magazine post I meant? With a collection of the post you mentioned?

Oh, no, I was using "magazine" as a metaphor for our steemit blogs :)

Back in the late 80s, early 90s, I used to make zines with my friends from time to time. Zines were self published punk rock style pamphlets made on photocopiers. You could find them at the independent record stores :)

I feel like Steemit is democratic like that, too. Cheers!

I guess that zines style is kind of what we are going for :) but the with hyperlinks anx digital sharing. Glad I Don't have to stand over a photocopier anymore!

Hehe exactly!

PAYOUT!
I promised to share the revenue for this post, but have been busy, better late than never !
This post earned me 1,1 SBD so that will be split between a commenter and a re-steemer :
Just remembered I promised 2 prizes of 3 SBD !

@rensoul17 for a most gracious re-steem
@the-dagda for engaged comments

They get 0.55 SBD each.
I will add the extra 2.45 SBD to the 0.55 transfer already made! Spend it wisely :) or foolishly which is more fun!

This was part of my JULY EXPERIMENT where I share ALL my SBD's earned with one commenter and one resteemer