Is Curation the solution?

If you’re here for long enough, it’s almost sure that you already saw it happen. You saw people spamming, plagiarizing and scamming others, gutless, without caring about the long-term faith of the platform. But why?

The question is why are they doing it? Abusing the reward pool is not the outcome but the symptom of something worse, I’ll get to that a bit later.

You should also check out my other Sunday Purge post since I'm making some references to the things I have mentioned in there.

Disclaimer: What I'm saying in this post may be right, or it may be just my hallucinations from too much tea but to know for sure you will have to research everything on your own.

Everybody wants money, from priests to politicians to even kids and if they can make a quick buck with little to no effort, they will do it.

Everybody’s throwing rocks at thieves, but the ugly truth is that if those people could steal money or “goods” without getting caught almost all of them would do it without hesitation if people could abuse the reward pool without risking anything nearly all of them would do it.

It’s human nature

The real problem

If the people that are raping the reward pool could make the same amount of money or even half by providing decent content, I think that at least 50% would take that chance and turn from scumbags into content creators.

People like them are just the symptom of the flaws this platform has. After five months and something on Steem, without the help of @Acidyo and other whales like him, I would barely make $1 something on my posts. After five months of providing what I think is valuable content, I would still get pennies.

Life as a minnow is rough; you barely make something even if your content is more valuable than the content of some of the whales and that, sometimes, is frustrating.

My question is, if those people can make $10+ without any effort, on a copied post why would they ever turn into content creators to spend endless hours on the platform and barely make $1?

The solution?

There’s no direct solution to this problem, abusing will always exist because even if you strengthen the support of the minnows, there would still be people that harm the community because they don’t know any better.

But there are things we could do, as a community that could considerably lower the number of spammers-plagiarists and even grow the number of new users.

If whales and dolphins would stop renting delegations to vote-selling bots and instead start curating valuable content this platform would have a chance to be significant. Even if you’re making fewer curation rewards by manual curation, by helping the community the Steem price may rise and your portfolio would worth a lot more.

But you see, as I said, human nature is the problem because those whales instead of thinking long-term at the faith of Steem they choose to get easy money by renting their SP or auto vote people just because they get big curation rewards without even reading the content.

The beginning idea of Steem was read and if you like the content upvote it and maybe even comment not auto vote after 30 minutes and never read the content so that you can make more money.

Manual curation is a long-term investment and the way to save this platform.

What about vote-buying?

Vote selling, as we know it is rot, is total shit. Nothing good about it because anyone can buy votes even if their content is shit.

The main idea of vote buying is useful: you can buy a boost for your posts since you’re making dynamite content and no one’s checking it out, but since then it deteriorated a lot because now everybody’s using it no matter how shit their content is.

Let’s say that we’re not killing the vote selling bots but just revolutionize them. Instead of upvoting anyone who’s sending some SBD, we need a bot powered by humans that check all the posts and if they don’t meet the guidelines or they are just spammers, the vote doesn’t upvote them.

But, if we as a whole focus on curation then there would be no need for vote-buying since even the minnows that are posting great stuff would make something.

Conclusion

If we want to see this platform thrive, to see the Steem price at its real potential, then we are the ones that have to act first.

We need a combination of curation and flagging, where some people downvote the terrible stuff and those posts “disappear, ” and other people upvote the great content so it can be displayed to more users.

If you want to help with the curation feel free to check out @OCD and get a feel for what everything is about and maybe even upvote the nominations since all the users we are supporting are undervalued.

The change starts with you.

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