Bringing better quality users to steem through good curation management

Here is a gif I made just for you guys, cable access style.

Some of my thoughts here might become irrelevant once SMTs come out, but i'm going to address some issues as I see them. We're all in this together, and transparency is an awesome aid in communicating with communities. I thought i'd share a bit of my process with curating on steem and the hurdles I see the platform facing. If you read my recent introductory post you would understand some of the philosophy behind my curating here on steem. Right now my impact may be small, but I believe in the search for better systems and I would like to help put Steem to the test. I've begun to adopt the harvester mentality in my life, and my main priority is seeding a wide range of creative folks on steem, not only because I think it will help grow the platform, but I want artists to succeed.

I upvote art I personally enjoy and find meaningful. I aim to build the community in a way that has:

• Diversity - free thought is a wide range of thought
• Strong voices - Artists with something to say, and a distinct style.
• Support for the little guys

Incentivising new users has several hurdles, we have to keep it honest on here, there are a few things that make it exceptionally hard to curate on our platform when we compare it to other types of social media. We have a huge spam problem from both bots and meatspace monkeys. Other issues are copyright literacy/morality, big accounts "gaming" the system, monetary distribution problems. These are very had topics, and I'm not looking to address solutions to these problems, rather effects of they have had on me as a curator so far.

Vote impact rides with the price, and the reward pool is thin these days. I have an account worth $6500 currently, when curating if I put in roughly 5 hours a week, I might make 3.5 steem. If I put in 10, i'd make 5 steem in a week. At the current price of steem that's like $4/h. Is that a good payout for the amount of steem, and the amount of work I do for it? It's hard to say really. Wouldn't be for most. at $100k worth of steem I'd be making $80/h! So here is an issue with curating. Steem doesn't reward quality curating (except a little) It rewards efficient voting, and you make it more efficient for your self by having a larger stake. The game theory suggests that if you own a bigger stake you will work harder and curate better but I would argue this is not enough. The curation reward algorithm is very simple, just a means for "PoB"; the "Proof of Brain" can be just as efficient in greed, or with cleaver bots, as much as careful hard work. In my opinion steem needs to hire more curators in order to be successful. There are several steem delegation initiatives, as a way to hire curators, but there needs to be more of this.

Problem: New users are coming to steem and getting forgotten before they are ever found, enough that further use of the platform is discouraged.

To get steem off the ground, we need to make it an attractive place for non-crypto users who will bring and engage with quality content. We need more accounts which are focused on incentivising new users, and building a good base for the platform.

Right now my upvote is only worth 40 cents on a good day, so I figured the best kind of contribution I can give to the network right now is in discovering newly recruited talent, giving it a little boost in visibility. I see this as lowering the noise floor, or increasing the amplitude on the post, giving it that much more of a chance to be seen. With this in mind I have been treating this account (Hive account@solar) as a kind of bottom feeder for content on steem. There is so much good content every day that is just drowned in spam. A few times a week I go to the NEW section on any particular art tag and just keep scrolling, and scrolling and scanning. Any time i see some interesting piece of art I open a new tab on the user. Once I have more tabs open than I can handle, I sort through all the users, filter out the spam accounts. If the users generally posts interesting content, then I subscribe, vote on my favorite recent post and finally resteem it if I think it's really solid. Every time I do this I find 2-8 people I might subscribe to. Building a good feed has proven valuable but it requires maintenance, and good filtering options are so sparse it hurts.

I have a few questions for you all:

• I'm curious if other curators have a kind of routine, what is your process like?
• What kinds of tools help you filter your feed, or sort through the tags on steem?
• Any one know how tags on the sidebar are decided? Any links to how steemit.com handles that?

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I'd like to keep these discussions open, Even if the original post expires. So feel free to reply two weeks from now, or three years from tomorrow and we can see how the platform is doing then!