As I have mentioned before the first plan for Learntocurie was to let it be a tool to help the curators of Steemitworldmap whilst working on the daily #traveldigest. After thinking it through I figured this would be a good tool for manual curation in general. But why does manual curation matter? And how the hell is Learntocurie going to help out with that?
I feel as if a lot of us more established users, are more and more moving away from manual curation, and this makes sense in a way. Over time we have found some users whose content we constantly like an upvote anyways. So we start adding them to any of the services providing to vote automatically from our account. There are a lot of ways, they make our lifes easier, they can vote at a good time for curation, they will assure you won't miss an upvote on an author you like etc. etc.
While it has a lot of good things going for it, there are also problems connected to automated voting. For starters, a lot of people automatically vote on posts that they already know will get high rewards, this to up their own curation rewards. This causes a "the rich get rich and poor stay poor"-atmosphere. On top of that, it lowers the pressure on established authors - which in my opinion is a bad thing, as in turn it lowers the quality of their content.
I disagree with this way of thinking, but I am sure a lot of people feel that there is no need to put up quality content, if it will basically get rewarded just as much as their shit content.
Last but not least, it makes it harder for newer but qualitative authors to get a part of the reward pool as such a huge part is already going to those few established authors.
These are some of the reasons, I am a huge fan of curation guilds such as 
I think that was a good recap as to why I strongly believe in manual curation, and I want to make it more easily accessible for everyone, because lets face it, the Steemit interface isn't the best for finding good posts quickly. You have to tediously scroll over all the mediocre or outright bad posts in order to find that one gem. With Learntocurie I aim to make this process quite a bit easier and less tedious.
First of all I highly recommend for you to watch the video above, as everything I am about to write here is most likely mentioned in there as well.
Learntocurie is a webapplication that aims to improve manual curation. There are a couple of ways we aim to do this.
First up we have added the possibility to filter posts based on presets, which you are able to save. The following filters are the ones we are planning to implement: time-range, max earned sbd over x time, reputation-range, wordcount-range, post contains, include tags, exclude tags, posts from specific users, posts from group of users (following, curating).
Secondly, we make the entire post visible and make it easy to switch to the next one. So based on your filter presets, we will pull up one post at a time that meets your criteria. In order to know whether something is a good post, you would have to open it anyways in order to read or at the very least glance through it. It's one less action you have to make.
Thirdly, we will make it so that all actions can be directly performed from within Learntocurie, and all the information you need is easily visible. Upvoting, commenting, resteeming, follow, curate, will all be possible. Important information on the post like: how old it is, sbd value, amount of upvotes, comments and resteems, will also be visible. Most importantly, you will have a bar showing your voting power up top.
Lastly, we have added a new group of users, we have called 'curating'. You can add people you would like to curate to this list, even if they're people you are not following. This can be very useful for certain curation groups, as from their account they might not follow anyone, but they do know certain users that are very talented, and deserve a bit more attention than others. Add them to your curating list.
If you want to play around with it yourself you can find the template at http://www.learntocurie.surge.sh. Keep in mind it is currently not yet functional, but it might give you a better idea of what to expect!
