You call yourself a curator?

Been a few long days, weeks and months of late - but that is just the way it is sometimes. I was talking to my brother today about various things as we usually do and then was thinking about all the stuff that I have bought in my life that had very little life and depreciated heavily, quickly. I wonder what my financial situation would be if I had spent the last 20 years using even 10 percent of what I have wasted to invest into something that appreciated in value.

The argument is of course that "we should enjoy ourselves" in life but I believe that this is leveraged to get people hooked into a scarcity mindset that says, "enjoy now because tomorrow you may not be able to" and as a consequence of people not investing much today into growth for tomorrow, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money isn't everything and isn't even required for happiness in most things yet, not having it in a world that requires it for much of what we do - makes it difficult to enjoy life, especially if one must continually push in order to afford basics.

Move into the forest somewhere and live off the grid? I don't think people realize that that in itself is a luxury item. Imagine if everyone on earth who could drive owned a car - imagine if everyone on earth chose to live off the grid. I remember hearing some silly factoid like, if everyone in China who could drive owned a car, they would need a carpark the size of France. Imagine 7 billion people living off grid - I don't think logistically the life of a hunter gatherer culture would be sustainable at this point, however disease and violence over resources would likely cull the populations pretty quickly.

I don't think the "Walking Dead" life is one I would be overly successful in, nor would I really want to live in that kind of world. Some might like the fantasy of it and I know a few who speak fondly of it, then complain when the grocery store doesn't have their favorite cheese. Fantasy is something that we all live in, regardless how right we might think we are or feel. At the end of the day, there are far too many factors to calculate and far too many unknowns that can't be factored in, which makes the confidence in certainty just a game of probability. Sometimes they pan out, sometimes not.

I am predicting certain behaviors from the community after HF21, I am predicting certain behaviors from myself. I am more confident in my own than others of course as I can control my behaviors. As I have said, other than taking back some active stake, not much is likely to change in the arrival of the hardfork because I want to see how the environment changes before I make any major shifts. The active stake is so I can downvote of course, let's see where that leads. My prediction is that it is going to lead to drama.

Drama is good. There is a relatively well known point with social media that the more angry people get, the more time they spend on a site. Time on Site is a metric used for marketing purposes and it is why the social medias look to generate some drama, look to polarize and poke groups to charge them up against another. Sex doesn't sell anywhere near as well as drama these days, which is probably why millennial have less sex than their parents did - weird considering Tinder exists. People satisfy their cravings online rather than between the sheets?

I am not a big fan of drama itself but then, if people want to attract attention to Steem there really is no better way than to create some drama and commotion so people will see what all the fuss is about. Any publicity is good publicity is probably still a truism of sorts if curated well.

Ever looked up the meaning of curated?

Google:

selected, organized, and presented using professional or expert knowledge.

Etymology online:

"overseer, manager, guardian"

Sounds like a paying job - not an algorithm - doesn't it?

Imagine being the curator of a museum and having artists come in and hang their work how and wherever they liked - What would you do? Steem isn't a museum however and the artists can present their work however they like, it is up to the community to actually curate.

Expert knowledge? Well, that is really only likely in niche communities where people who are enthusiasts and interested hang out as they are really the only ones who may have the actual knowledge to back it up. But when it comes to art, anyone can have an opinion, positive or negative and when each is an "overseer, manager, guardian" curating the content, management of it is making sure that what is worthy is not cluttered by what is not.

But of course, most people aren't actually curators on Steem other than wanting to earn from the work of curation without actually doing the overseeing, management or guarding roles. Some of course curate what they like, but forget the other side of the job. Curation is subjective of course but no gallery I know of worth a damn is going to hang pictures from any artist on their walls without curating them first to make sure that the art meets whatever standards the gallery has set. Each individual has standards of course too, each individual has a different set.

This is why to work out what is actually supported by the community it requires positive and negative curation because as a group, that which is supported will get more positive than negative. Algorithms can fake this of course, so can marketing teams for example, ever thought about how a song debuts at number one in the charts?

At least before Spotify, what happens is that the chart is driven by sales of the album and the record company "sells" to the distributors masses of the album under the provision that whatever doesn't sell they will take back and refund or offer credit on. When I worked in a CD store in about 2000 - the boxes of crap singles and albums I had to ship back or mark for destruction was incredible. Debut at number one....

See, it is not possible because no one curated it before the debut, no one had an opinion, no one had heard it, no one knew anything about it at all. Yet, because it sat there on display at number one, it got some attention and perhaps piqued interest, but if it didn't gain traction and actually sell, it plummeted out of the charts. Currently, Steem allows for promotion that gives a profit, so not only does it get into the eye line, it makes money regardless. Well, unless it is actually curated. If it is worthy, it will make more profits. If not? Well... it gets boxed up and sent packing for a loss.

The thing on Steem is that people don't like to be confrontational and would much rather have everything curated for them. This already happens of course on centralized social media sites that curate their feeds for their own benefits and, take a hefty salary for the work they do. Yes, people might like those feeds much better but if one is looking to earn on a job called curation, curation needs to be performed.

Up until the coming hardfork there has been no direct benefit to do half of the curation job meaning that the gallery has got very messy indeed with a great deal of content getting "sold" without anyone even seeing it. The coming changes at least close the gap somewhat and bring in the potential for loss where if someone wants to risk pushing their song to number one and the community doesn't think it deserves the position, no profit and likely a loss can be made.

Will people actually do their job? Depends on the person's ethics really but anyone claiming to be a curator and there for the quality content creators, are not doing their job if they are not overseeing, managing and guarding the content creators and content they deem worthy. If a curator at the Louvre allowed graffiti artists to tag over the masterpieces hanging on the walls, you'd likely agree that the curator hasn't done a very good job of looking after the gallery, or the work it contains.

So are you a Curator? I think we are going to see after HF21 how many people will have to change what they call themselves if they don't do the job they claim is so important to them, and the content creators they support.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]