🤔 Something Old, Something New, Being Borrowed and Feeling Blue 😔

I've had a funny few weeks here on Steemit, I know I'm trying to do too much but it's fun (sometimes) and there are many thoughts swirling around in my head at the moment so I thought I'd take a bit of time to share some of them with you.

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Where to begin 🤔 ...

When I joined World Of Xpilar, I decided that this was a community where I wanted to spend most of my time. I'd occasionally look at other communities and keep up with users that I've grown to like but I'd do my best to help this community's members and help the community grow. I wanted to focus on the positives - a community that would tackle the unsavoury elements and keep them out of sight, and support all of the Fantasy Sports Contest that I was running. It's all good.

To continue this positivity, I decided that I could make a difference with my coding skills and set to work on writing Steemit a new front end. The long-term ambition being to get enough together to write a proposal to the @steem.dao and get some funding.

Initial progress was good. I was able to work with @steemchiller's API with little difficulty and found a template that looked decent and was easy to work with.

And then I became increasingly encapsulated by an old life and was seeing too much of what I didn't like. In writing the new front end and my "new-found" Steemit coding skills, I saw scams and unethical behaviour everywhere:

• The 46,787 accounts using their 15 SP delegation for farming
• The community that orders its members to delegate to the community account (which primarily upvotes the community admins)
• The community that has nearly 100 pinned posts (That's some serious self-promotion in the name of community - I counted 16 mouse-wheel scrolls before I reached a member's post - how the fuck will that work in a carousel?)

To name just a few. It made me sad.

So I looked around some more - many of the communities that were created to get Steemit's "Community of the Month" are now gone which came as little surprise. I thought I'd discuss this with an old friend to discover that since exchanging Christmas Greetings, he'd powered down and left the platform 😢 Is it inevitable that the people we've grown to like eventually power down and leave? It made me sadder.

This all made me realise how important the rejuvenation of Mosquito Squishers and the work of @ac-cheetah is.

It's beginning to look like there are more scammers on the platform than there are honest users and whilst my new front-end can hide a lot of this, I started to wonder what I'd be left with if I did.

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It's not all doom and gloom though - I've probably covered "Something Old" and "Feeling Blue" (mostly) and just threw "Being Borrowed" in there for no good reason. So on to "Something New"...

Hidden amongst all of the shit, there are some great authors writing great content and working beyond their own desires for a better, greater Steemit. But how do you find them or do you wait for them to find you?

@o1eh recently wrote this post about his experience preparing to be a steemcurator (have a read if you haven't already done so) and one paragraph in particular stood out:

I looked through 32 posts, checked them for plagiarism and #club5050, but did not find any worthy support. It was a shock to me. Then I realized how difficult the work of a steemcurator is.

With a steemcurator01 reply of:

Welcome to the world of bigger curation 😀

And then the inevitable steemcurator01 brown noser:

wow this is really really amazing

Resisting the temptation to downvote the brown noser, I took it upon myself to help a bit more.

The "Top Commenters" initiative was designed to increase interaction and highlight those users who not only post content themselves, but take the time to interact with others. So perhaps I could use the same idea to judge posts...

A post's rewards are supposed to be an indicator of its quality, of how "liked" it is but we know this isn't the case. So is there a better way of highlighting posts that people like? I believe that there is, and this is where comments and another new persona come in. You might have missed it...

@icymi is a user who looks at posts nearing payout and ranks them by the quality and quantity of comments (similar to how the "Top Commenters" algorithm works), with plenty of additional rules. The idea being that it highlights posts that other people like enough to engage with comments. It's also a reminder of posts you may already have looked at that have had additional engagement since you moved on.

I've currently got it running in 6 communities and hope to continue expanding it into more and would appreciate feedback. Please let me know if you're within a community where supporting its members in this way appeals to you.

Another user I've created is designed to directly help curators - whether that's steemcurators or anybody who's simply looking for "High Effort" content from users committed to growing their account - @curator-helper

I'm aware that "effort" can take many forms and mine is perhaps a crude interpretation of it but this user is designed to help manual curators find content fitting a specific group of tags. It only highlights users who have not made a withdrawal for 12 weeks (roughly 3 months - i.e. #club100) and has more rules and blacklists than I can remember.

Interestingly, some of the top posts highlighted in the early "editions" were subsequently upvoted by steemcurator01 so by supporting some of these authors, you may well also be maximising your curation rewards.

Please let me know if there's a list of tags that you're interested in curating and I'll see about creating a list of articles for your needs.

I've rambled on enough, probably missing some important thing that I wanted to share with you but we are limited by how many hours we have in a day and I've consumed enough of yours and my time.

Thank you for reading. As always, I'm interested in hearing your thoughts.