RE: Reflections on the Benefits and Growing Pains of Project Curie, Steem Guild, and Other Curation Projects on Steemit
Appreciate your comment - I'd agree that focus is better and may have some better business sense to it. After all, companies like Paypal only managed to really get their first leg through the door when they shifted focus on selling their services to the top players in eBay.
Back to Steemit, that "focus" phase has already happened during the pre-July 4th launch. Back then it was mostly about cryptos, government, and musings about Steemit. However, I wouldn't call what happened back then to be bottom up. The top influencers were definitely seeding the early adopter's accounts, quite directly from top down.
Anyway, decentralisation (in a social sense) necessarily means diversity. The focused, heavily-centralised phase is over. Perhaps it can even resume back to the way it is, but the network has to grow into a social media platform. And there will be cost requirements to come up with cognitive-mining pools (curation guilds) to help top influencers put value into the many accounts that are coming in. In that case, the decisions are actually made from the bottom up since our field curators and proxy voters are working together to call the shots. And as cost optimisation, process automation catches up - we will see a dissolution in curation guilds, perhaps into smaller chunks.
I may be biased being involved in the curation group, but I don't think such efforts are contributing to the decline. No doubt this is just a band-aid approach. Ideally, the whales should bust their asses day and night doing their best to reward good content creators. Fact is, most whales are miners, and aren't necessarily equipped with the skills and especially, time to do DD checks and reward diverse contents. Curation groups enable power distribution with more pairs of eyes and brains to do the job. And there are already signs of specialised curation groups, and steemtrails is one of it. Hopefully by seeding a breadth of small accounts, there will be a greater organic curation especially when Steem price catches up again to better market evaluation.
I'd like to make one other comment on this portion of your reply to @dennygalindo.
Sometimes tactical retreat is called for. The explosive growth in July did not sustain. The active user base is now smaller, the rewards pool is smaller, and if we've learned anything it is something that didn't work incredibly well to effectively launch the platform into a large wave of adoption.
In many ways the situation on Steemit now resembles the pre-July period more than the July-August period and perhaps refocusing on some key specializations makes sense, as either a base for slower organic growth or as a platform for another, different, attempt at a large adoption wave at some point in the future (perhaps when social features on the site are better implemented).
Just a thought, but I think a perspective well worth considering.
The sustainable solution is to make people want to power up. Why would they want that?
To get voting rewards and to raise their comment to the top.
This could be done by a curie type org that finds voters to follow, not posters. We have plenty of posters, need more voters. More commenters would be nice too b/c it builds community. Commenters and voters power up and writers take money out and lower the steem price..
Thus far all "marketing" like curie is focused on the writers who take money out to "make a living".
it's no surprise this is causing an accelerating decline in steem price.
Interestingly now that vest are under 90% it makes a lot of sense to power up to curate and comment. Marketing applied now could create a self sustainaing org. People power up, get more voting power and power up more to get more voting power.
Definitely worth considering @smooth, I've been thinking lately perhaps the focus that's required is perhaps, back to seeding posts / accounts that work to perpetuate Steemit both internally and externally. But then again, I think that's the natural participation of most Steemians that will eventually lead into strengthening the currency over time. Maybe the focus should be about that..
Before the July period, the top daily curation lists took about an average of $50-60 per listed entry.
Now with Steem back at July prices, Curie's top daily curation lists are taking about an average $4-7 per listed entry. And this is used to support:-
To add, a decent level of DD, QC and collusion-avoidance with 2-3 layers of vouching for every suggested post, plus the #curie outlet - imo, it's a good mix of decentralisation and self-policing.
Moving forward, we are going to (and have been) implementing the following:-
I understand your concerns.. and it certainly did not escape all of us in the team as well, especially when the daily reward pool is shrinking. Organic curation at grassroots now is way too little for any meaningful curation, even when my vests are > 100M atm. (I could give out a cup of coffee / vote a few months ago, not now).
Personally, I think the overall ops will retain and build a database of close-knit, diversified set of creators. At one point, I think Steemit will have an on-demand gig layer that could provide services to non-Steem related entities, which will drive Steem's value moving forward. Imo, Steemit could be a very valuable database, with everyone in it essentially acting like a HR apparatus.. and I think this will have an edge over stuff like freelancer, fiverr, etc, and could be positioned in many various ways. Still working on that concept to present.. (this is a conjecture, of course, but what's not conjecture is the internal trading that's going to happen through store functions, and the database needs to be pre-populated).
Thanks @smooth, I think it's healthy to continue the discussion. No doubt I'm biased, seeing that I've been with the team since day 1. But we're definitely doing what we can to keep it relevant while working on community feedback, plus adjusting cost dependencies on the ops scaling with the value of the currency.
In a way, I guess a curation group like Curie is all about mass user attention / distribution, a way out of many other approaches to improve the network. What are your thoughts on what should be focused on?
I'm not sure what this means. Before July, I don't remember any real curation lists at all. I know @arhag made a few custom lists of rewards, but that was about it. So I'm not sure what you are describing.
Some of the things you mentioned seem a bit possibly overinvested to me. That may have made sense with 20x the reward pool but given the current size of the economy I'm not sure it really supports that level of 24/7 staffing, layers of vouching, etc. Just a thought, I don't know the details of your business model. Could be time to go leaner though, and try to keep the best of the positive impact that can be delivered with a lower footprint.
Focus on the consumer side of the equation...
It's possible this is a required evolutionary step. I think specialized curation ( and consumer recruiting) might work well to reverse activity trends. For a while we were the best place for crypto news and now redit is much better or Bitcoin talk. We have 3000 active users. We are much better writing about (and rewarding) their shared interest than something that might appeal to tens of even 100 of them. Writing for people to get them to join is not smart. You don't need to join to read! We need to write for the activity producers( posters commenters, voters) the rest will come automatically.
Great post! Especially the part about the whales... we essentially do what they cannot. I would imagine more and more whales will join efforts like this in the coming weeks/months.
Somewhat. They are doing so according to rules and guidelines that are entirely top down. Someone decided that spreading the wealth and creating a lot of $10-$30 posts (along with one daily $800) post is a good idea. It may be, or it may not be.
There do need to be ways to for stakeholders to delegate, but there are many different ways to skin that cat, and it doesn't necessarily require any particular model of delegation such as a guild. For example, some of my vote power is currently delegated to a specific individual I have picked who is an effective curator and is very self-directed and self-managing, this minimizing my time investment, while resulting in competely decentralized curation that I personally find to be effective.
The answer on how this really should work is a lot less clear to me now than it was when I started the Teamsmooth Curators guild. I think we need more experimentation and in that vein things like Curie are a good thing, but let's take care that they don't turn into a self-perpetuating bureaucracy supported by a daily $500+ reward fund tax (which as @dennygalindo points out is equivalent to a daily $10K+ reward during the price peak).
The daily rewards are an issue to me as well, and it was one reason I wrote this post. I see this as a temporary band-aid and I think the formalized voting guilds will allow for better models, but for the meantime, the work these projects are doing is too important not to support. I'm definitely in agreement with you that we should continue experimenting (and listening and being open to other ideas). There is no top-down decision-making or magic # to the $30 rewards; the team members have come up with that rewards range as a group, but we are not wedded to it at all. In fact, we have been adjusting these at various points and are quite open to community feedback about what works best. If a better model were to emerge, I can't tell you how happy I would be to stand aside. :)
Hi Donkeypong.
About the daily post you made with curie. why not just post it on a external site or use the 0% reward option?
That daily post could fund another 25 authors, instead of the curie account.
His point is that the rewards from that post are needed to pay the costs of operating Curie in its present form. Otherwise he could just post an update and summary less frequently (say weekly) as another option.
Tough decisions may need to be made though (I think noted in the post). The reward pool is shrinking and that is a significant slice being drained from it.
Maybe top-down is not exactly the right way to describe it, but the point is that it is institutionalized and such institutions must have a degree of inertia to sanely function as an organization. Curie has a mission statement (an informal one at least). That's not to say it can't evolve, but people join knowing that mission (and likely supporting it or they wouldn't join), so it becomes self-reinforcing.
Individual voters who haven't institutionalized their decision making can and do more easily shift direction on a whim, as quickly as today's hottest pop star can be tomorrow's has-been. Steemsports is a great example of something that likely wouldn't have been popular or fit the mold of what voters were looking for a few month ago, but it successful now.
I started a curation guild to discover unrecognized posts and authors (and still have an individual dedicated curator doing that for me) but now I'm recognizing more value in people having at least the possibility of a critical mass of success and earnings in some (not all) cases that call for more focused voting. In some ways the smaller reward pool makes this even stronger as the amounts of very-widely-distributed rewards become increasingly meaningless (better to give at least meaningful rewards to a few, I think). So the pendulum swings on these things.
sorry need to reply to another reply the 6 answer reply limit is so bad ;)..
Yes I read that donkey said they are thinking of getting rid of the finders fees for authors. so under this assumption they could do it externally or post a weekly update.
do you know what happens if one uses the decline payout option? will the reward pool still shrink?
The reward pool does not shrink if the post is not paid out. The rewards get allocated to other posts instead.
in this case if curie got rid of finders fee's they could do their daily update using their decline option.
I like the post as I can see which posts they voted and I can't track manually all their votes.
I trust donkeypong and all others that they will find a way to optimize curie in the future.