Week 52: #introduceyourself Curation Post

It seems like yesterday I had thought about doing something unique to find a way to somewhat give back to the community while trying to add value to the ecosystem. My original thought was to find new users eager to start on the platform and curate their introductions while providing them some guidance to properly onboard and have access to key information while they start their journeys. It was an idea based on what I would have wished to get from the community when I had started. However, it was truly different moment in the history of Steem as the hype was in full cycle when I joined so nobody really cared about adding value as the value was only the tokens. However, less than a year later, the community had become victim to the bear market which led to declining engagement as rewards and prices tumbled.

As we bottomed and struggled to survive, the community really stepped up and started to rally around itself to promote more value added initiatives to support the ecosystem and its future. While price has not followed suit, many of us can continue to feel the improvements and developments on a daily basis. I see how the communities have started to focus on special interests which have resulted in the deployment of Tribes with their own rules on how to be rewarded. This has led to even more introductions as many of these Tribes and their sites have attracted more users.

In addition to these communities fostering an environment to attract new users, there have been a number of communities and users within Steem that have continued their focus to curate and welcome new users. Therefore, instead of curating new users this week, I wanted to highlight these accounts that also engage actively with new users in the search to keeping them engaged and learning about our great ecosystem!

Hive account@heyhaveyamet is one of the best accounts at welcoming new users and highlighting them on a daily basis to attract existing users to their introductions for engagement. I have loved seeing their concept expanded to seeing more and welcoming more users as I truly believe that the foundation of having better retention is not only engagement but the motivation of being heard and rewarded when starting.

@Ma1neEvent is a user I ran into while curating introduction posts for the Hive account@ocd community (up next). Similar to my approach, there are periodic posts to highlight some of the newest Steemians and their introduction posts in an effort to drive more traffic to them as well as curating them with rewards. It has been funny to see us both highlighting sometimes the same introductions as some days it is tough to find great candidates for curation.

Hive account@ocd is a great community that focuses on curating undervalued posts and authors. It has been an honor working within this community although the last couple of weeks I have been falling behind on engaging due to work and travel. However, they have a vibrant community of curators and while their focus is not on new Steemians, they have a section that focuses on sharing introduction posts for curators to keep an eye on for future curating efforts. I have seen the difference in retention and engagement when being selected for curation by this great team of curators!

Hive account@c-squared is an account I started to follow when engagement was down significantly. I was searching for content to curate and I sure found it as they are also quite active in searching for and curating posts across the ecosystem. Similar to Hive account@ocd, they do not solely focus on new introduction posts but some have been so good that have caught their attention which has led to resteems to share over a broad community of followers and curators as well. Sometimes half my feed are from the posts they review!

While I am still in a transitory and reflective phase to see where I am headed going forward with content creation, I still believe that this effort to motivate retention and engagement by actively curating and sharing new users is a great way to add value with my stake. I have also enjoyed seeing how different users approach their journeys here and it gives great perspective for those of us here today after our own experiences. Therefore, I think this would be one of the last efforts I would adjust.