Curation, is half of what Steemit is worth. Curation is a fundamental process and lifeblood of what will make or break Steemit. It is absolutely essential that not only more innovation and effort. There is no doubt, that better curation will directly impact Steemit in a positive manner.

More good quality content will be found instead of dieing at $0.12 payout, more feeds would be propagated with content that actually interests you.

Steemit Whitepaper, Page 27:

Even with Curation Rewards and Curation Guilds like @Curie and @OCD, it is clear that currently, curation isn’t optimal to say the least.

How Much Curation is Enough Curation?

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Curation Guilds are but a handful of hardworking people who are dealing with a tsunami of content to wade through.

Curation Rewards currently do not incentivize regular users enough to actually go out and find good quality content that has yet to be found.

In this post I am making a proposal for a new form of curation on Steemit which can make the user-experience of finding not only good but, content relevant to what they are interested which is also much more narrow than tags. Of which, all of the content will be highly specific to a specific topic and also, very importantly, curated by humans.

Curation Lists

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Modelled after Pinterest boards, but with much deeper functionality, Curation Lists are a feed of content which is subject-specific and can be as narrow a field of subject as the user creating the list desires.

Though this is similar to User Categories, of which I proposed in utopian.io yesterday, I believe that there should be a distinction between Curation Lists and User Categories, in terms of functionality which I will explain further.

Highly Targeted Subject Specific Curation

Any user to create a Curation List, and begin adding content from all over Steemit into the list. Each Curation List should have a specific Title which identifies or give a general suggestion as to what the topic of the list is about, as well as a short description to further define what the Curation List will curate. The point is for each Curation List to have a specific subject or topic, and the owner of the Curation List will add topic relevant content which is deemed by the user to be of high value.

Think of it more like a Profile Page for Curation

Not only acting as a topic-specific list, this list should have the ability to dynamically update interested users of the subject to newly added posts.

Ability to Follow Curations Lists like you follow Users

Users will be able to follow Curation Lists of which they are interested in e.g. Bow Hunting, Dota 2, Bitcoin Price etc. and have the posts that have been added to the list, turn up in their “People I Follow” feed, acting in the same way as when someone you follow, resteems a post.

In doing so, they are highly likely to see subject-specific content of which they are already interested in turn up in their feed, though they most likely have never seen a large majority of the authors within the list.

The Owner of The Curation List Can Invite Other Users They Trust to Curate

A singular curation list may have multiple authors, but only one list owner. As such, acting as a moderator of sorts, the list owner may choose to invite or boot other curators to the Curation List to contribute.

Curation List With Additional Features

Just like a regular user profile, a Curation List would be able to have an image banner. Alongside that, the Curation List would have :

-A Pinned Post
-Feature of Curators of the Curation List
-3 Featured Authors, randomly rotating from the list of curated authors on the list. The more times you have been curated, the more proportionately likely you are to be featured.

Ability To Delegate Upvotes For Curation Lists

Users should have the ability to set Auto Upvoters to specific Curation Lists. Given in an example that there is a Curation List that curates Charitable Causes, People In Need or Weird BDSM content (Whatever, I’m not your mum), users can entrust their votes to Curation Lists for whatever reason they may have, as a curation list grows in size, it would very much be profitable as well, all while supporting authors within a general subject area that you are passionate about.

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Profiting from Curation Lists

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The defining factor and the engine of any free market, is profit. If it is even reasonably profitable for an individual to take an action, the likelihood of the individual doing so is clearly, very much higher.

Current System + Curation Lists

With no changes made to the current system, users may profit from Curations Lists by:

Personal Curation Rewards

Curation rewards garnered by upvoting the piece of content before curating it, where, given that the Curation List is popular enough, a flood of upvotes will come after, hence, profiting a larger than usual curation reward by getting in earlier.

Personal Curation Rewards, which also a varying factor depending on the amount of SP you have, will generally turn out to be a not exactly wildly profitable endeavor.

Accepting payment for curation.

Quite simply, users pay a price for their content to be either definitively curated, or to Curation Lists with higher standards, considered to be curated, or somewhere in between.

Accepting Payment for Curation is surely some level of scummy, ending up with Curators spending time sourcing for buyers and playing games rather than the actual job of curating.

Additional Curation Rewards for Curation Lists

A fair way for Curation List curators to make some profit, would be by having the all upvotes which were garnered by being referred from the Curation List to earn 15% of the curation rewards of those specific upvotes.

This entire process is curation in it’s purest form, and just as the reward is called, Curation Reward. Leaving 10% for fairness to regular curators, curating in the traditional fashion.

This would create a system where Curation Lists with some level of following and notoriety would easily justify their time curating quality content, with a proper monetization system, allowing them to focus on nothing more than doing the best job of curating.

The End Result

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More Quality Content Will Be Found

With Curation Lists in act, more good content will be sifted from the tsunami of content on Steemit and the gem will be found and rewarded, more often than not. This is a key function of Steemit that is still extremely unrefined at this moment and could really use the help.

Users Will Find More Quality Content That Is Specific To Them

By following just 1 Curation List which is of high-relevance to your interest, your “People I Follow” feed will be often be propagated with the absolute best content written on the subject from an array of authors who you very well have not heard about.

Users will effortlessly find quality posts which are highly specific to their interest delivered right to their home page while discovering new authors which are relevant to them.

Synergy Between Authorship and Curation

Both authorship and curation when done in this manner will also synergize with each other as if your curation efforts gain traction, it is more likely than not on a subject that you are actually interested and passionate about, of which you most definitely would be posting about as well.

The self-promotion within your personal Curation List would garner you more views of highly-targeted users who have shown interest in that specific topic and is very likely to engage. Users will have an additional avenue to make profit from both authorship, and curation.

Bring Curation To New Heights

Curation, once again, is the lifeblood of how the Steemit ecosystem will succeed. As amazing as @Curie and @OCD amongst the list of amazing ongoing curation efforts, they are but a hand full of people who can only achieve so much each day.

As Steemit continues to scale, there needs to be an effective means for curation to scale accordingly alongside it. There is no stronger power than the power of the swarm.

Curation Lists will once and for all tip the scales and properly incentivize curation efforts from mass amounts users on Steemit. Bring the highest quality, user-specific content in right to user’s home page.

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This is an ongoing proposal which does require holes to be poked in it, and for it to be mended, as well as innovative input on the matter before further refinement and proposal once again.

So please do add in your thoughts on the matter in the comments!

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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