Curation: What’s in a tag?

in #steemit6 years ago

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One of the decisions you have to make when you take time to curate content is to choose which of the tags to focus on to maximize curation rewards for those who may choose to purely do so and not necessarily create any content themselves. You may opt not to favor any particular tag and chose to curate from any and all available in a random manner.

If you check out the listed topics currently on offer you will soon find that some tags have a higher overall payout than other and though this may be due to an overall larger number of posts, the ratio of post to payout is not always constant with some tags having a better post to payout ratio than others.

With this trend in mind, the logical reasoning would be to favor you curation efforts on those tags that have a higher payout to post ratio to maximize your reward if that was the only criteria in consideration.

The problem with this way of approaching curation will led to some tags been underexposed while other having a disproportionate representation and relatively well researched posts which add value to the platform go unrewarded due to been grouped under less paying tags.

The questions to ponder here are,

  1. Why do some tags seem to have a better payout ratio than others and how is this determined?

  2. Could it be that they are of a higher value content wise than others and if so is this disparity well deserved?

  3. Is this system subject to been unfairly used to reward content which on closer scrutiny may not have as much to offer?

  4. Will this inequitable distribution eventually result in good content creators under lesser paying tags opting out due to the disproportional payment for their work and lack of recognition?

While it is to your own choosing on whom to give an upvote to, doing so assumes that you have read the content and you have found it beneficial to you and as a result you have acknowledged the author’s effort with that vote.

Not doing so may benefit you in the short term by giving you more returns if you chose those tags with a better payout ratios and not merit but eventually the purpose for which curation rewards were put in place will be defeated.

Check out those less visible tags as they may contain posts that though less paying to you as a curator, are worth your vote of encouragement to their authors and will eventually result in having a system where quality content attracts equitable payout no matter the tag.

Image source from Pixabay.com

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Our tags really do matter. We ought to use the right tags. Thanks for the reminder, @tony19r.

@floxycool helps in reaching the audience you what to target.

I often have a hard time choosing the best tags. They do matter a lot though. We should always maximize our full potential use of the tags as well and use all 5 so that we can give ourselves more exposure. I like to look at the less visible tags more often than I do the bigger ones. The bigger ones have so much content coming through all once, the post has gone down the line within seconds.

@magicalmoonlight You are right on the number of tags to use as they will determine how widely the post gets coverage. The key is to ensure relevance to the tag the post has.

You got a 12.50% upvote from @brandonfrye courtesy of @tony19r!

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