Symbiont{s} | Ecosynthesizer Curation Project | A Refresher
Greetings,
We received several calls from the community and were suggested to provide an update or an actualization for the community about our curation project the @ecosynthesize. This post should also act as a refresher for new users who were not here since when we started.
The Genesis
Our curation project is one of those projects that are not hard to understand or overly complicated. It is a straightforward project that focuses on manual curation and all of what it entails. But before continuing, did you know that the @ecosynthesize project started 3 years ago? Indeed, the project started exactly after the Hive split to support users because a lot of investors and whales have moved out, so we made sure to move quickly and tried to do our best to fill the space that was left by several curation projects that abandoned Steem and left a lot of active authors without support. Below you will see the most important announcements and evolution of the project. The project changed a lot and is now different from when it started three years ago.
1- Curation Project Anoncement | The Ecosynthesizer
2- Ecosynthesizer | Support Request & Update
3- Ecosynthesizer | Sharing 100% of the Curation Rewards and More
4- Ecosynthesizer | Curation Project Update
5- Curation Project Update | TRX Distribution
6- Downvote Campaign Against Ecosynthesizer
7- Curation Project & Vote Behavior
Technical Organigram
To save you the time to read everything, below are our main core values and operational workflow. Because even if our curation machine is working seamlessly and convey a sense of simplicity, there are a lot of things that are going on.
100% of the curation rewards is returned to delegators. The project is non-profit via this process we mentioned before. Delegators should never worry about delays in returns as everything can be traced on the blockchain, abd the time of distribution may vary.
TRX distribution is close to 100%, minus fees which can change based on the price of TRX. We are trying to build up more bandwidth to make sure to allow ourselves more free transactions and lower operational fees as much as possible. TRX distribution should also be expected to halt since distribution happens at the discretion of Steemit Inc.
Delegators can be sure that their delegation will not be used to engage in negative voting unless specified otherwise by delegators. This was not the case before, but we introduced this rule at a later time to ensure that the authors we are supporting will not be subject to retaliation in addition to out delegators as well.
The curation project is not community specific. We are probably one of the first curation projects that aimed to support several communities at the same time before Steemit Inc started their great curation initiative. This means that we have curators that speak different languages and are able to support a wider range of diverse content.
As is the case with any respectable curation project. Curators are requested to do their due diligence and do their research and create a close relationship with their community to enhance the quality of their curation efforts and make sure that authors are genuine and the content is authentic. This is why in some communities such as Cotina, we encouraged the managers to advise the community members to share pieces of their life via genuine photographies which created a solid baseline for content that is free from plagiarism, AI schemes, and any other form of abuse. While this could not be easily achieved in other communities, some geographically based communities that have a less favorable economic conditions are more likely to take the extra steps. This of course does not mean that we are not curation in other communities, it only shows a proof of concept that dictates that an increase in rewards usually means an increase in quality and overall efficiency. Especially when the team behind the community and curation efforts are skilled.
We are constantly working in close partnership with several community owners that are in dire need of help, and we are proud that we have been able to save several communities from closing and dying out. As we understand that for a community to function properly, there needs to be a closed system of financial feedback for the maintainers, hence why we also made sure to not enforce specific rules within the communities but tried instead to implement ourselves within their already existing workflow without being invasive.
Following a suggestion from Steemit Inc, we are currently declining vote requests from curators on authors that are using any kind of automated service since it goes against the proof of brain which is one of the initial core mechanisms that is supposed to bring value to Steem. We also believe that authors need to understand that expecting curation and support would also mean that other authors are also expecting it as well, and if everyone is not willing to use his power to support other authors other than the self, then no one will be left on Steem.
Since we have a lot of curators, we have implemented a mechanism to ensure that all curators can at least request x votes every day regardless of the voting power threshold. We have made this to ensure that less active curators can still have a chance to curate similar to curators who are more active and have more time to spend on hunting good content. We do not like to pressure our curators to reach a specific threshold as we believe that curation should be a fun thing to do and only when people have the time.
We have several types of ways to reward our curators for their efforts but we are mostly adhering to only one of them due to a lack of power. One of them is using a dedicated bank that we stopped using due to a lack of rewards. The bank was supposed to be used to distribute a fixed daily amount of STEEM that will be distributed to curators based on their efforts. By efforts, we mean actual curation aimed to support authors in need of support. We actually disagree with curation projects that fail to support authors because they were rewarding curators based on curation efficiency, which eventually lead curators to try to front-run large votes on farming accounts to maximize their efficiency due to the nature of the voting curve on Steem. This method is ineffective and not efficient when it comes to PoB. The other method that we are currently using is simply allowing curators to add their own posts for curation as long as they are active curators and doing their part of the job properly.
To avoid repetitive requests for the same authors which tend to happen a lot, a time window is enforced to make sure that the curation is as diversified as possible. We understand that curators tend to circle around the same authors hence this mechanism. The time window will likely rise as the potential rewards get bigger. Our goal is not to make authors rich, but to incentivize them in their journey on Steem.
The voting approach is split in two ways, there is a ranged vote that is based on a predefined percentage range. In addition to this, curators and community owners are allowed via a request to fund contests or anything similar to have limited access to a custom percentage to incentivize participants.
The level of requirements for a vote is quite different and can change based on the location and region. To put it simply not everyone in the world sees 3 USD the same way. In some countries, people could live off it for a month, while in other countries, it will not buy you a thing. Hence the understanding that the expectations or requirements usually need to be paired with economic conditions, and this is also why it is so hard currently to retain users from certain regions.
Among other things, one of the goal of this projects is to support authors, more specifically, authors who are less unfortunate. For this reason, there is a rule that is automatically enforced that makes sure that all vote requests for posts that have already accumulated x rewards will be automatically rejected.
It is naturally difficult for our curators to track thousands that were or are involved in any form of abuse, this is why we are operating our own blacklist. If an author is blacklisted, then any vote requests toward said author will be automatically rejected. But even with this approach, we found from experiance that a better approach, especially inside a specific community, is simply to have a good team of moderators that will do their best to clean the community of abusers. Since our curation tool can also allow a locking for posts to be allowed from specific communities only, the task becomes expanantially more effective over time. In addition to the blacklist, a set of rules regarding blacklisted beneficiaries are also enforced automatically, this is mainly to ensure that rewards via genuine authors are not funneled indirectly to other accounts to circumvent the time window.
We have a zero-tolerance policy against any curator who is found to be abusing his position. We are not a company, and it is hard to manage a large number of people without spending a lot of resources. Hence, the relationship with our curators is based on mutual trust. This allowed us to have a team of curators that are highly experienced in doing their job and well versed on how Steem works.
As mentioned above regarding the factor of efficiency. Our APR tends to fluctuate a lot since we aim to support less unfortunate authors, which involves voting on posts that are less likely to receive large votes, which could have an effect on the overall efficiency compared to a project that is forcing its curation to hunt for high-efficiency which ultimately result in curators voting for authors solely based on the potential rewards increase.
The curation activity is happening on our official Discord server. If anyone wants to check it out or simply wants to reach out to discuss anything, consider visiting our server.
As stated by Da Vinci, simplicity is indeed the ultimate form of sophistication. We believe that something that works seamlessly does not need to be overly explained to y users, the end user does not need to think about it but only enjoy his time. But we understand that people might be curious so we are more than happy to share this small peek at the inner workings and intricacies of our curation project.
Thank you for passing by,
The Symbionts Team,
Well done🤍