Steemit Update [ August 20th, 2022 ] : Community Curators for September - Applications Open
We hope you are all enjoying another month of the Community Curators.
They have been doing a great job expanding the curation reach of the @steemcurator accounts.
Now it is time to prepare for the new month of September.
Following the successful introduction of Team Lucky Dip for August we have decided to make further big changes for the coming month.
We are dropping team applications, and we are dropping theme allocations.
For September we are going freestyle…
The Community Curators for September
Instead of team applications, for September we are inviting individuals to apply if they would like to be Community Curators.
From the individual applications we will select six teams as we did with Team Lucky Dip.
The teams may be of varying size - anywhere from one to seven - depending on the number and quality of applications.
Also, as the second big change, we are dropping the specific themes allocated for each team.
Instead all teams will be free to vote on posts on any subject.
We also want teams to look beyond communities. There are many good posts that are outside of any communities - just directly on people’s personal blogs.
Teams should seek these out.
We hope by dropping themes and tags it will reduce the rather obvious tag content farming. There has been a considerable quantity of poor quality, often spun or plagiarized posts appearing over the last few months produced solely to chase votes from the Community Curators.
The third significant change that is being introduced for September is voting on comments.
High quality relevant comments add a whole new richness to the Steem blogging ecosystem.
Good comments can be as interesting and as valuable as good posts.
We want good comments to be encouraged and rewarded.
Therefore for September we are looking for the curation teams to allocate a significant proportion of their voting capacity to comments.
We will not set a specific percentage for this, but we will keep it under review during the month, and will welcome feedback from the Community Curators as to whether they find sufficient quality comments to vote on.
How to Apply as a Community Curator
If you would like to be considered as a Community Curator you should make a post including…
A brief summary of your history on Steem.
Details of any positions of responsibility you have held on Steem.
Details of specialist or professional skills or expertise you have in ‘real life’.
What country you live in and what languages you can read fluently.
Your key stats - own SP, CSI, Reputation, Delegations.
Any subjects you particularly enjoy curating.
The minimum team size you would be willing to serve in (1 - 7).
To apply to become a Community Curator you must have a reputation of at least 65 and you must have at least 2500 SP of your own (not delegated to you).
Keep posts brief and easy to follow. Include the tag #curatorapplication in the first four tags.
Applications can be made in any language.
Posts should be submitted by 11.59pm UTC, on Saturday, August 27th, 2022.
How Community Curators will be rewarded
Every day the teams will be allowed to allocate one full vote to a member’s post - ideally in rotation. If a team has less than seven members, members can potentially receive more than one vote per week.
In total no more than 10% of the account’s voting power should be used on team members each week.
Additionally each week one member should post a report for the team in the Steem POD community with a list of their top 7 posts, with a brief note of why each post was chosen.
These posts should set beneficiaries to share the rewards with other members of the team.
The posts will be voted by @steemcurator01.
Thank you to this month’s Community Curation teams. You are all welcome to apply again as individuals for September.
We hope the new arrangements for September will encourage many more people to apply to become Community Curators.
The selections for the Curation Teams will be announced by the end of the month, with a view to starting at the beginning of September.
The Steemit Team
Undoubtedly, this is a great innovation on the platform. Many times, I feel the community space is sometimes dominated by unreal individuals that have mainly set up accounts to farm upvotes at least 3x and a probable selection in the top spots.
We have tried as much as possible to reduce these but not totally eradicated yet, I guess this new method by the team would go a long way to refining our dear Steem ecosystem. A few users have been doing great in terms of commenting before and I believe the initiative we are looking forward to would make things better and competitive to make quality comments (knowing you tend to earn more from it).
I'm loving how the ecosystem is turning into a more interesting social space with the team's different initiatives. It's a bit hard to say goodbye to my team of many months but the positive change this is bringing is greater and it's worth it.
In addition, can we take identity even seriously this time? A few users only have their images on achievement posts and after that, they continually share content that has no relation to their identity, mostly targeted at community curators. The most likely reason for this is an account being operated by an existing user while the images in the achievement task are just figureheads.
Considering the last paragraph, the claim might be greater than what we could have imagined, I appreciate it when some communities tell their participants to take selfies in some contests, is this enough? Can we take it more seriously by screening users more intensely to see how far the same person in the achievement tasks has consistently appeared in his/her blog?
In essence, some have just been contracted to have their images used while the real person in charge does the job and this has promoted more farming accounts.
I'm well pleased with this amazing change by the team and we hope for the best. Thanks for the update, steemitblog.
We are very keen to stop the content farming.
We rely heavily on the Community Curators and the Country Reps to help identify and call out the accounts involved in this content farming. General members of the community can play their part in this as well. They can always contact their Country Reps if they spot any suspicious activity.
That's quite true, community curators and country reps can play an important role in the process, I have seen some working in that capacity who have been able to identify some in the past, likewise, some community members.
That being said, I think one of the mistakes that have been made before now was tagging only moderators/admins of the communities where the irregularities were found. For instance, an account identified to be a farming account under the former curation theme can easily move to another theme and get supported.
Members (one or two) across other curation themes could have been tagged in the process to beware of such accounts in the first place, as such makes the identification more effective across the platform, I believe this would be worked on subsequently.
In addition, when there are issues with farming accounts and it becomes so necessary for the country reps to investigate the case. I think introducing cross-border investigation with the aid of reps from other countries would also be great after the native country reps have done their jobs, this would further strengthen the process of resolving such cases.
I understand there might be language barriers but close country reps with almost identical official languages can be of help in such cases. Thanks for your attention, SC01.
Hi my friend, something that I always ask everyone who is going to do curation is to review the profiles.
If someone has been labeled as a farming account, or as a plagiarist in one community, they surely practice this in the others.
Many do not review the profile, and this is important.
As well as what you mention about using real and own photos. Farmers do not usually take selfies, or use their own photos. Although this is not restrictive, but in plagiarism, photos from the internet are often used.
I quite agree with the format of reviewing accounts before voting an article, I practice this often to see how genuine a user in question is.
The most disastrous part of it is selecting a user that seems not genuine for the top spot, no matter how good the content is, one should be able to review and see the activities of such users over time. I guess this is the reason I have left some articles out of top spots previously.
Yes, they don't. You know it would be hard for them to ask for pictures of whose picture was utilized for the creation of the account over and over again without opening room for another contract, of course, they are not ready for another one.
You have nailed it, @inspiracion. Thanks for your time.
Feel free to tag CRs as well.
Okay. Thanks for the listening ears on the situation, SC01.
I think to reduce farming account users should use real profile photos so curators can match profile photos with photos in content, as a greeter I always ask newcomers to use a profile photo.
Sorry if I'm wrong on this.
Thank you for the update. I think these changes are great and that we will work in a much better way. You are right many users were spamming by using all the tags rather than only relevant tags. This would make our work easier. This is great that we have to vote on good comments and of significant voting amount. That's a really good initiative by the steemit team for engaging users, improving the quality of posts, and strengthening their accounts.
You have spoken well @ashkhan hopefully this new change would be for the better.
Exactly
Umm, interesting initiative which in my opinion cancel out a lot of abuse which has been going on. This community curators will be forced to leave their previous teams and work eith new individuals which is a brilliant idea.
Excellent, excellent initiative. It's time that users here start to understand that good comments are as important as good posts and they add a lot of value to this platform. This will now, instigate people to come up with good comments in hopes of getting votes ( I really hope that's not the only reason)
Looking forward to seeing new users as curators, good posts and comments in the coming month
Great innovation again in the curation field by the Steemit team.
I think, it is the best thing to make a balanced and well-desciplined. We know that in past, many deservers were not included in the teams while some of the non-deservers were present in the teams. This new scheme will eliminate such person from the curation field.
New roads of success will open for the hard working Steemians. Thanks a lot @steemitblog for this update.
Steem On!
Well said brother.
Ini inisiatif yang sangat bagus sehingga semakin banyak konten berkualitas yang mendapatkan kurasi. Juga untuk komentar yang relevan dan berkualitas, sesuatu yang pernah tim Steemit lakukan dulu dan dapat menumbuhkan keinginan steemian untuk meningkatkan komentar di setiap postingan.
Thank you so much @steemitblog for this update.
No doubt team lucky dip is working amazingly. They are dip in the world 🌎 and select quality post or post that is engaged by others.
It's great initiative. It will helpful for every Steemians. Oops , it was my bad. I can not meet the requirements . I will build my profile till meet requirements. Then surely I will apply.
Wow this is very interesting, the initiative is very nice and i will definitely drop my applications as to this regards.
New changes made are truly amazing and opened doors for every individual to apply for the post .
Gratos cambios, es muy interesante esta nueva dinámica para los equipos de curaduría. ✌
This new move sounds very very interesting
It's sounds like balloting 😅
It also challenges your personal progress on the platform
But I feel that its a good approach and positive changes are very much welcome
Good luck to all the applicants!