How many of you are old enough to remember STEEM Guild?
STEEM Guild - let's just call them SG - was a curation guild on Steemit that was the focus of some controversy back in the good old days.
The controversy stemmed from the fact that the members of SG were given the keys to use ned's full voting power in their operations.
This was back before delegation was a thing. A sort of pre-delegation delegation. The same idea, basically.
SG used ned's voting power not only to curate other people's content, but to "reward" themselves for all the hard work they did. This basically meant upvoting their own posts to the top of trending. Usually a post per day.
Said hard work amounted to.. going through people's content and clicking on the left mouse button. Some extra work probably included operating the voting weight slider.
I opted out of getting votes from SG in my attempts to martyr myself and become the noble hero of Steemit because I disagreed with how they operated.
My main gripe was the arrogance of SG claiming and assuming that their curation work was somehow more valuable than what every other member of the community already did - without ned's voting keys. Without the privilege to upvote their own posts to the top of trending every day.
For whatever reason - even though curating is something everybody here does "for free", sans curation rewards - SG's curation work was just so valuable, so stressful, and such hard work.
No way could anyone survive a job like that. Reading posts and clicking on a mouse.
I mean, sure, I guess some people work at construction sites at a million degrees for much less money, but still.
We are talking about reading posts and clicking on that upvote icon. At the very least, it deserves some sort of hazard pay.
Well, the STEEM Guild is no more, but I still sense a similar culture on Steemit when it comes to some users. Without naming any names, there are people who clearly feel that their manual curation is something that deserves added pats on the back.
Just so happens, these same people are usually ones with big delegations.
To justify their big delegations (not saying they somehow have to) the go-to justification is always that they work so hard curating. They do a lot for the community because they manually curate.
Uhm, okay?
So, basically, is it less hard work for me to manually curate someone than it is for someone with a sizeable delegation? Does the amount of SP used determine the amount of work it requires to read posts and click that upvote button?
Why is it a heroic deed to curate on Steemit, anyway?
Most of us curate on Facebook every day. We curate on YouTube every day. I curate on Twitch every day.
And it doesn't make me a hero. It makes me consumer.
Finding enjoyable content and consuming it is work now? Did I miss a memo at some point? I mean, with my fucked up sleeping patterns, it wouldn't surprise me if I did.
I've manually curated here for two years now. Most of the time every single day.
Where are my ned keys?
Where's my delegation?
I've worked hard, damnit. The number of times I've clicked on that left mouse button during these two years, my goodness.
Well, to me, it would feel kinda silly to ask money for consuming good content online. And not only that, but to hold myself up to some sort of a weird pedestal because I, the hero of Steemit, sometimes read posts.
What a completely weird culture when you think about it.
I guess other people's curation is just more equal than others'. When I curate, I get the curation rewards I earn from it. But when professional curators curate, they get delegation for daily self-votes.
And indeed: the monetary reward for curation has always existed on Steemit. It's called curation rewards.
It's just too damn bad, in my opinion, that when someone like 
And speaking of which, I need to get back to writing that chapter. This was just a small break.