150+ days of the dropAhead curation team

English | Castellano

Really?... Yup... Time runs sooo fast!

First of all, please let me acknowledge every curator in the team:

@ana-maria

@antoniomontilva

@develcuy

@joyita

@mandolincarls

@marilia

Our team has supported about 5000 articles among tens of thousands! Along with other interesting stats about dropahead.

Also, we must acknowledge every person that trusts our project with their witness vote, a total of 157 witness votes for dropahead so far.

Now is when we should make a little break to analyze our progress, what is working, what needs improvement and what is not working.

What we are doing well

According to our humble opinion, the dropahead Curation team is strong at quality. We are aware that quality is not always popular, but when we curate the focus is on finding the best content, so that we incentive content creators to create better content every time. We believe this is the right way to contribute to the STEEM ecosystem, since this is a content platform, content is the king!

Other strength we have is SPAM control. We are know for being very strict with our simple set of "weird" rules. Note we don't fight SPAM, we actually avoid it. Rather than punishing people for posting SPAM, we "curate" people! When we are sure that a person is willing to follow the rules, we let the person to share links in our channels. This model allows us to focus on curation and to keep our channels neat. We believe that is another contribution we do to the STEEM ecosystem, because we aim to support people that creates real value!

What we should improve

Dealing with hundreds of articles and people every day is a BIG task that we have distributed among a curation team, allowing us to handle the load. Yet it creates complexity and bureaucracy, or simply called: overhead. Technology helps us to reduce overhead. We created the lazy-steem project and other internal tools that automate our daily tasks, yet we need to work harder on automation, because it will allow us to scale high!

SPAM control and membership management is working pretty well so far! But we are very slow at allowing new people into our system. Actually, we are not marketing much because we have a large waiting list of people, larger than what we can handle and it creates frustration. People is supporting us willing to join the project, they follow us, vote us for witness, they invite other people to join, and so on..., but when they see no answer from us... they get angry! So they revert their support and start to blame us. Then we are creating detractors rather than supporters. We might disagree with such attitude, but it is real, people needs our support NOW, not later!

Quality has improved among our membership base but we should go to the next level! We should create writing guidelines and training materials, and to peer review content before publication. This is a BIG challenge because STEEM does not provides such functionality out of the box, so we should implement our own web app and process. It will require resources we might not have now but we believe that it is possible with the help of our supporters!

So far the dropahead Curation Team is just volunteering time. Most earnings from our contribution to the project are converted to STEEM POWER. Just a little fraction is paid to the curators, thanks to the people that upvotes their comments on curated articles that we select every day. Unfortunately this is not sustainable, everyone has a day job which is priority, so we struggle to operate as a professional team, sometimes our daily reports get delayed for days and we loose our hard earned momentum! Earnings have to increase! We should get a bigger amount of supporters!

What we should stop doing

NO MORE manual work! The less we do it, the larger we can scale. We will!

NO MORE stay quiet! The more reach we have the bigger support we can get to keep growing the project.

We want your feedback!

Please let us know your insight! Are we right? Are we wrong? What are we missing? How could we improve? How can we serve you better?... We can't promise we'll do everything you ask, but we can assure you that your feedback will be heard an evaluated. Please share your thoughts!

How to support the dropahead Curation team

Upvote and Resteem this post!

Follow @dropahead!

Vote @dropahead for witness

Delegate/donate STEEM POWER to @dropahead

By doing the above you will give us more STEEM POWER (SP)
to give YOU more earnings next time!