Hey everyone!
Wow, what a week, eh? Many have been asking me why I haven't been posting much lately and wondering if it's due to the tron/witness things or the retaliatory downvotes. It's mainly been my witness duties taking a lot of time and curation taking the rest, I don't want to discuss the witness stuff much in this post though as it's being talked a lot already on chain, discord dms and slacks. My DM is always open if you have questions about it or want to discuss it, I just want to mention how proud I am of the witnesses doing the right thing and everyone who's understood this difficult decision they had to make for the security of Steem.
I am really glad about the new feature implemented by Steempeak that allows you to cross-post as it has allowed me to share some great posts from users on the chain into the right communities and with that using the autovotes on my account instead of them going to waste (if there are autovoters that rely on me to not keep their vp at 100%). With every new feature comes a big spectrum of usage and misuse so let's dive into what we at OCD think about cross-posting and how we will proceed to allow it's usage onto our community.
Before we get to that I just wanted to share a screenshot from 3 weeks ago of our community stats at the time and how much it has grown since:
Now:
Over 900 new subscribers since 3 weeks ago and over double the amount since communities were rolled out, amazing, thanks to everyone being part of it and sharing your content through us!
Cross-posting
To keep it simple, we will only accept cross-posts from users who share the works of others into our community. Yes we know this can be abused with alt accounts, etc, but as curators who are active here daily and have been so for a very long time let's just say we know and witness a lot about the userbase. We also check each cross-post to see how much the original has earned, if one of our votes has already landed on it, if the author is "abusing" his autovotes to cross-post everywhere or has friends doing it for him. We will be very selective with curating cross-posts and after warning users a set amount of times we will have to mute them which will result in no curation/visibility on our community.
Cross-posting older posts is still a bit of a gray area but there too we will check what the past rewards were and that none of our accounts already rewarded the post. We'd prefer this to be used mainly for relevant/timeless posts and mainly if they were really missed out from curation.
So TL;DR:
- don't self cross-post
- don't spam/abuse your autovotes
- don't "vote-trade" cross-post (similar rules to general vote-trading apply if you are mainly only cross-posting the same authors constantly - if you do this a lot you run the risk of being mistaken for an alt account of the author you often cross-post )
- be rational
If you think you have been muted unfairly from our community, you can always join our Discord server and let us know why you think that is the case.
Empowering niche communities
From Monday forward we will be doing a big change to our compilation posts. As you know we have been nominating and curating posts from outside of our community in there and we will keep doing that, but now with a change of structure. The compilation post will now instead be split up in different communities and consist of nominated posts from each of them brought to us by their curators and admins. This will give the posts some extra rewards and visibility with the compilation posts being pinned daily at the top of our community.
Communities supported and collaborating with so far; Travelfeed & Steemitworldmap, OnChainArt, AlienArt and Lightpainters United
Other than that we are also actively curating the Steem Gaming Community and SteemDevs
If you are the owner of a niche community and could use a kickstart of curation, please get in touch with us through our Discord and we will discuss things further to assist you in growing it if we feel it is an important and unique one. Thanks!
Thanks for reading, feel free to let us know about our stance on cross-posting and if you think there's something we've left out. We are open to changes and the current rules may change over time.
We will be sending out a one-time memo to every content creator who used to be in our old whitelist / someone 
