Hi Hive account@dantheman,

Glad to see you’re keeping a close eye on the curation rewards and your analysis is a very fair reflection of the current landscape.

I agree with your assessment that curating for profit isn't the province of 'minnows' and is really only viable for whales and dolphins. Those with low SP should post and comment for profit and vote for pleasure. However even as a dolphin, it is difficult for real life human curators to compete with bots and make the enterprise profitable. I've spent the last two weeks curating incessantly and experimenting with ways that human curators can earn decent rewards. I may post on it at a later date.

All I will say for now is, it isvery hard work and takes a certain mindset to be able to consume content (early and fast) and execute a strategy to stay one step ahead of the bots. I was "winning" (if that's the correct way of looking at it) up until a few days again, however some of the bots have revised their strategy are putting on 'the squeeze' (you may notice some bots voting earlier on content today than they did say last week).

As a human curator, I have human commitments and limitations that make it hard to compete with a well created bot. I'm resisting the temptation to go down the route of 'coded curation' (even though I'm confident I could define and refine rules to maximise rewards programmatic-ally). To my mind that would defeat the purpose.

I'm still clinging to the ideal that humans can use their own senses to curate content and profit from it. However I fear you may correct and this may become the province of bots and algorithms. If true, the issue I have with this, is that algorithmic curating could lead to algorithmic content creating, with people tailoring their creativity to feed the bots. We could then get into some weird AI loop of manufactured content creation and curation that is divorced from the artist/ emotional/ intellectual expression and enjoyment that makes us human. This would be undesirable in my view.

I hope I'm wrong. Wherever you have human activity it seems it can be invariably done more efficiently by robots. Maybe we are dawning the new age of 'bot art' that actually enriches our human existence, who knows. Or maybe more simply, bot creation and curation can co-exist with its human counterpart with both sides being able to prosper and grow. I'm hoping the latter.