A curation trail is a form of automation. You can choose to follow a particular voter, and any vote they cast - you will automatically cast. The chain of votes that follow the original vote is commonly called the “trail”.
Streemian is one of the common tools that people use for this:
https://streemian.com
But why would I want to follow someone else's votes instead of deciding my own? How does that benefit me?
Your votes earn a small amount of curation rewards. If you follow the votes of a good curator, you may earn more than with “organic” voting. Other people like to follow the votes from projects they want to support (like @curie).
Ah, I get it. If I either want to earn as much as I can from curation OR want to sort of donate toward a cause like curie, then I could join a curation trail and not concern myself with having VP available for my own curation.
I see now why the descriptions of them never appealed to me. Finding and upvoting content I love is one of my absolute favorite things about this platform. It never quite sunk in with me that some of the folks who love steemit don't love that about it!
Thanks so much for the clarification.
What is your method for finding something that interests you? I still have a problem with doing that. The best to find something "new" for me is to watch newest feed...but it is full of trash and it is sooo time consuming. Do you know a better way?
My feed is good now because I've been really selective about who I follow then unfollow people if I see too many posts of theirs I'm not interested in reading. But to get it that way I did a lot of "follow the trail" reading on the platform.
I searched first for topics that interested me (spirituality, psychology, and crypto mostly), then once I found good writers who were active in their comments, I started also checking out the profiles of the people commenting. Most of the people I follow I've found that way. Similarly, I check out the profiles of people who comment on my posts and see if I can find people who write interesting posts on my topics that way too.
That's a piece of nice knowledge. I thought for the long time, that curation trafiła are to collect rewards, but some time ago I read about other usage of it. Exactly what you said - to find better content
You approach this in the same way I do - I follow just one curation trail at the moment - I also upvote any comments made by a tiny number of my favorite creators whom I know very well. I am able to follow up using "account operations - toggling the 'out', 'upvotes' or 'comments' feature on @steemchiller 's steemworld tool, every single upvote that goes out as a result of my following a curation trail. I do it somewhat obsessively on a daily basis or at least every 3 days. This way I discover a ton of great content out there because I get to read the content plus the curation trail @upv4life constantly adds new members who support the project too. I use the open source steemauto tools by steem witness @mahdiyari for following curation trails ;-)
So a trail CAN lead to this side benefit - discovery. It beats looking at the trending page! I am still keen on supporting @megabot with delegation too. I get daily returns on my delegation and the accounts being upvoted are cleared and reviewed so I feel all right on that front. One should weigh up profit and acting responsibly. The bots imo are great because they give everyone a fair chance instead of having the whales support content which they agree with only. It isn't all about quality when you look at the content carefully - it's all politics. There is a lot of noise and hype made about bots and s&itposts - I disagree with all that and recognise that most of the garbage is supported by a handful of powerful projects which self-righteously claim to be all about democracy and quality. What is actually happening is they are recreating a google-type enclave by all their scare propaganda using spam scams and the like to get everyone on board with their opinions, while the accounts they support run away with the spoils of the day.
Same here. I've been here for around 2 years now, and every vote I have cast has been manual :)
I have seen you vote for posts from a lot of the same accounts every few days. How about the flags - are those manual too? I make very few flags - about one every week (on a bad week). YOu seem to make at least ten every day and then 10 upvotes as well in the same day. The flags are made in quick succession as well. How do you do that manually? I should learn speed reading ;-)
EDIT: whoa! wait just a minute Mr nice guy - a few days ago, about 70% of your votes were flags! Are you the censor board? - please don't retaliate by flagging me kind sir. I am just a wittle fishy if you don't agree with me, pwease weave me alone
All of my votes are manual. A lot of the votes go to people I follow, when their new posts show up in my feed.
The posts I was downvoting were all part of a coordinated spam effort to create a bunch of posts to shill an ICO.
No worries, I have no intention to downvote you.
Well , that's a relief! I was afraid because one of the whales who's posts you regularly support, punished me by abusing the flag on a completely unrelated post when I flagged a spam comment one of his coordinated efforts left on a project that I support.
I was afraid because you support him, I would be on the MARK by assuming that you support such flag abuse.
To clarify then, you call it coordinated.. I call it non-organic and automated. It's a form of censorship to prevent anyone from promoting anything or any point of view. Calling it spam doesn't get anyone a free pass in my book. One person's spam restricteratornatorfreedom fighter of spam, is another person's terrorist. If the process is proven as transparent, where a post is checked in a transparent and democratic way, then you could begin to call it organic or curation or anything like that. Democracy is very important to many of us. That's why we don't like Google+ or Facebook.
A flag (downvote) is also a vote. So what you said is not true. You have actually applied votes without reading them. Judging from your frequency of flagging, you seem to prefer downvotes over upvotes too. You also only upvote posts by accounts that you follow. This is fare enough. It's the frequency of the coordinated effort votes that are a concern to a lot of us. I just wanted to get that out in the open.
holy shit, really? How many other top 20 witnesses can say that? <3