Steemhunt is NOT a Writing Curation Project

One of the things I hear most often about Steemhunt is that the hunts rewarded are of poor quality.

People who have spent longer than three minutes looking at the platform and tried to understand the platform, have undoubtedly discovered that like many Steem projects which have a reasonable amount of SP (delegation)... abuse is ~~was~~ is ~~was rife~~ is being constantly fought.

It seems that on the Steem blockchain, Steem Power brings the worst out of people and opens the floodgates to pretty much anything. Mostly anything low quality.

Obviously, as a platform this has affected us and still affects us, but in ways maybe differently than most expect. In “loving the challenge” ways.

Because Steemhunt is a daily ranking board of effortlessly cool products, voting plays a big role and not just in the sense that upvoting means Steem rewards. On Steemhunt the community’s votes decide which products, hunts are the coolest for the day and receive an upvote from Steemhunt based on their ranking at the end of the daily window.

The Steemhunt founders, @tabris and @project7, have been very creative and absolutely reactive in the period since the Steemhunt Airdrop was announced. In little more than a month, the following platform evolutions were released:

The moderation platform: community members became moderators and review all submitted hunts every day for compliance with Steemhunt’s Posting Guidelines
The introduction of Account Based Voting, complete with its own Magic Sauce. Magic Sauce which is in its third iteration already, iterations implemented to counter most rampant abuse found on the platform
Community Influencers: the most recent Steemhunt introduction is a program introducing community members who benefit a higher Steemhunt upvote boost when curating hunts.
The goal of this is two-fold: both countering continued, and constantly evolving, forms of ranking manipulation as well as incentivizing curating hunts more and attract new curators to the platform.

At this point, as a team we feel the platform is reaching a degree of maturity, maturity hopefully capable to withstand the worst forms of abuse we’ve seen and to return the daily rankings to being mostly about the coolest products, rather than about who managed to mobilize most buddies via Discord or WhatsApp. Managed mobilization without getting blacklisted, of course.

But, Mayhem, there’s something you have to know and accept: the writing for so many hunts sucks.

I hear you. That’s by design. Wait, wait!!! Slow down with that .357!

phew Thanks for that!

As I explained last week, it is perfectly imaginable that one could submit “the perfect hunt” completely without description at all. After all, Steemhunt’s submission form doesn’t even have a minimum required word count.

Because Steemhunt is not a writing quality curation project. Steemhunt is about discovering cool, new products.

Currently around 300 hunts(*) daily, sometimes more, are submitted to Steemhunt by around 200 authors. In general Steemhunt covers 6 distinct product categories:

Web services

Mobile apps

API, IT solutions, bots, open sources or other types of software

Tech gadgets, hardware, IoT/connected/wearable devices

Games

Innovative Engineering/Design Products

While every day hundreds of new products are introduced, theGadgetFlow stalking hunters see only 12 every day, the challenge to find a great product becomes harder every day too. Already now many hunters complain they can’t find two products daily.

Finding that product which WOWs sufficient curators to rank in an organic top 10 is a real challenge... a hunt to find the most amazing, inspiring product of the day.

Not a writing contest.

While a well-crafted hunt can be more compelling than a poorly written two paragraph “job done” hunt, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is cooler.

Not in the ethos of Steemhunt.

That Isn’t What Steemit is About

I agree, it isn’t. Because you have already decided yourself what Steem(it) is about for you.

And, that “Steemit Thinking” is something we all need to learn to leave behind. Because Steemit is merely the first, the centralized initial rollout platform to the Steem blockchain. Not the end goal. If everything succeeds, there will be thousand of apps/SMTs operating on the Steem blockchain.

As I’ve covered here before, the Steem blockchain is one of the most amazing platforms because the backing blockchain can scale and allows an Internet 3.0 to build on top of Steem.

Not every project, SMT, will cater to user generated content or reward writers. Steemit as such is poor by design because it isn’t supposed to be the only interface.

As the Steem ecosystem matures, and hopefully SMTs are launched in a not too distant future, more and more projects built on Steem will cater to their own demographic of users. Have their own rules set.

Have their own mechanics.

Many may even leave those who enjoyed Steem(it), as we’ve mostly known it so far, behind. Leave them behind complete with their self-upvotes. Just like your selfvote isn’t counted for Steemhunt’s Hunt Score (HS).

Where platforms like @DLive and @dTube reward (rich) media content and @dSounds rewards audio content, all of which doesn’t require (much) written content, @Steemhunt rewards those who find the most popular products of the day.

Rewards in a democratized way without excluding those who never became professional authors or who may have grown up with different languages and only started practicing English (and writing in English) as they discovered the World Wide Web.