An Alternative to Trending & Promoted

For some time I have been looking for a way to bring Proof of Brain back to Steemit.

• Are you looking to find new quality content on Steemit?
• Where do you look?
• Does it feel like finding a needle in a haystack.

There are limited options to browse content and the rise of the bit bots has made Steemit pay for play. It sure doesn't feel like Proof of Brain is alive and well at the moment.

Steemit describe proof of brain in the Bluepaper in the following paragraph.

Token systems that reward users as they contribute to a token-based community system require mechanisms for establishing and evaluating content’s social value: we call this "Proof-of-Brain".

Lately it feels for many that for the most visible posts, quality and originality is suffering. At least the stuff you get to see when you browse Trending or Promoted pages.

Finding New Content...

Existing Users

As time goes on existing users seem to have an advantage. I have been here for over a year now and in this time I have built up a list of quality accounts that I follow (over 1,200). This means my feed is a source of some great content

but...

• Building this list has been quite an investment in time and apart from the occasional resteem I potentially miss out on newer authors and content.
• 1,200 accounts produce a lot of posts on a daily basis so I don't get to see what the community has curated. Proof of brain is lacking!!

New Users

First impressions count. In order to increase retention and attract more new people I am searching for a way to make finding good content on Steemit easier.

• If your a new user to Steemit its not always the easiest to find people to follow and content worth reading. The most obvious place to go is the Trending page.

I would propose that for these two groups, even me with 1,200 people in my feed, we are both missing out.

There has been some initiatives to curate lists to make finding content easier.
Some examples include:

• @steevc's Follow Friday where he shares people that are worth following
• @promo-steem resteem posts that have been voted on by 3 ambassadors.
• @steem-dublin resteems posts that have an Irish interest.
• ...

@callahan

@callahan is an experiment to see if we can create an alternative to the trending page where you can come and browse diverse and manually curated content.
The trending page uses an algorithm based on reddit to find content and it may just be that any existing solution won't work for Steem/it which is a completely new way of looking at Social Media.

The trending page currently shows content that seems to be constantly from the same small pool of authors and some of it is of questionable quality to say the least. This is not the go to place I would send a new recruit to Steemit for many reasons, but until now I have not had a good alternative.

Image Source: pixabay.com

Proof of Brain

Is the current system really evaluating contents "Social Value"?

The idea with @callahan is to follow certain Steemians that seek out and find great content then resteem posts that they have voted on. This creates a feed of manually curated content that is interesting, diverse and of high quality. Most importantly this feed is not bought.

Let the network do the work of curating!

Some authors have built up lists of quality followers and spend a great amount of time scouring their feeds as well as other places such as specific tags searching for hidden gems. This is a hugely valuable resource that we are grossly underutilising at the moment. For this experiment I have set up @callahan to resteem @anomadsoul and @teamsteem, both of whom I know spend a great amount of time looking for good content and spreading their votes. The best part of @callahan is that this list can be be adjusted over time by the community.

Browsing

I would not recommend following @callahan because your feed will be filled up with resteems but check the account feed from time to time to see what @anomadsoul and @teamsteem have been voting on. Each time I look at it I discover new authors and some really interesting content. This feed has restored my faith in Steemit!!!

• https://steemit.com/@callahan

One final thought after reading the update by @roadscape on @steemitblog today is that even after communities arrive @callahan will continue provide a mechanism for people to get exposure across different communities.

Please let me know what you think and if you have any suggestions on how this can be improved. My current plans are to build a front end website for browsing different tags from this list and also a community driven transparent way update the list of curators to follow. Watch this space!

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Thank you for reading this. I write on Steemit about Blockchain, Cryptocurrency and Travel.