Dear Steemians,
When I first heard about Steem I was attracted because I saw it as an attempt to fairly rewarding content creators and curators. It is understandable that people fell for Facebook and Google as they were seemingly giving away very good software for free. But now in 2019, it makes no sense to me that so many people continue to work for these companies without getting paid.
In Steem I see the possibility to find great content while at the same time supporting the creators and the platform.
However, I am still trying to find out how to best support people and projects on this platform.
The easiest way I saw was to buy a bunch of Steem, power up, and curate. But I soon started to realize that I was curating without a strategy, sometimes even without knowing my own goals. As a result, some of my upvotes are inconsistent and some contradict each other.
I'd like to give you an example of a conflict: One of my goals is to see the quality of posts to increase to the point where great authors on other platforms switch to Steem (why are they posting on Medium?). Another of my goals is to support new people and people working under challenging conditions.
It is for the second goal that I sometimes upvote posts that I know will adversely affect the first goal.
If you are a manual curator I would love to hear how you are handling your curation. Here are some questions:
Should I base my upvotes solely on the quality of the posts and thereby support people who already know how to produce?
Should I assign some of the upvotes to people to encourage them to become great authors?
How much should I direct towards diversification? For example, to make the place more interesting by upvoting authors from many countries (that may follow ethical rules that would be called unethical elsewhere)?
(Note: My engagement is not primarily of a charitable nature. I don't mind making money with my investment. However, I take no interest in becoming smart in draining the reward pool. I will consider this investment a success only if the Steem price significantly increases and I profit along with everybody else.)
