STEMsocial: Curating Again Since Last Monday!

STEMsocial, formerly known as SteemSTEM, aims to use Hive as a science communication medium.

^{[image credits:@glass.wolf ]}

After a successful move to Hive, our curation team has been back to work since the beginning of this week.

All STEM-related tags (and more!) are now actively under scrutiny, and we try to support as much content as we can that keeps to our standards of copyright, plagiarism, etc.

Today, we will explain how to get support by STEMsocial on your blogs (guidelines), how to get even stronger support (using the app, beneficiaries) and how to support our curation efforts (delegations and ROI, trail).

Guidelines

Our curation team browses many tags to track down original and quality content related to all STEM fields in six languages (Chinese, English, French, Italian, German and Spanish). We still mainly focus on the good old `#steemstem` tag, but we will smoothly trade it for the `#hive-196387` tag that corresponds to the STEMsocial community on Hive. This migration will be implemented in our app in the next few days.

In addition, all tags such as #science, #technology#, #engineering, #bats and other relevant tags are of course included in our curation efforts.

To get the best out of our curation efforts, there's a few things you may want to keep in mind.

Our support requirements ensure that any given post discusses some STEM content, although we are flexible on this definition - for instance, we have long supported history, psychology, economics, architecture, medicine and more.

We have always been highly respectable of one's intellectual property, and as such, we always verify that a post is not fraudulent or dishonest: references are checked, images are credited (and must be available for commercial purposes) and of course, plagiarism is absent.

Your content itself can be quite freeform; there is no length requirement, and we use subjective criteria to assess the post quality (and therefore support strength) which includes originality, style, effort and creativity. As one writes on a social media blockchain, we focus on content that is easily digestible by anyone and everyone.

We, of course, discourage simple rewordings of other articles such as those found on Wikipedia or any scientific news websites.

Voting strengths

We upvote posts according to four levels (that may change over the months according to vote share and token value):

10%: To encourage a new user or to acknowledge effort.
30%: Average post that fits the guidelines but doesn't really discuss anything new or exciting, or that is not written with any personality.
65%: Very good posts showing both character in their writing style and bringing some fascinating content to Hive. We feel that this class of posts contains information that could be searched for in the future and should thus belong to the top posts.
100%: The best of the best, often written with a unique approach to a topic. This content may be completely original, even groundbreaking, demonstrating one's own research, and it will typically be an easy and even fun read.

Extra Benefits for Creators

Our support usually triggers a voting trail of independent curators, as well as of other initiatives like

@curie or

@minnowbooster.

Using the stem.openhive.network app and setting @steemstem/@stemsocial as a beneficiary (any small amount helps!) slightly increase the support. Similarly, comments posted through the app are eligible to small upvotes.

^{[image credits: @medro-martin]}

Supporting STEMsocial

The best posts, resteemed by the @steemstem/@stemsocial accounts, are all featured and highlighted in our weekly distilled series that will resume soon. In those present times, we usually support about 50 posts written by about 35 unique authors each week.

There are several ways to support us, which includes in particular a delegation to the @steemstem account. We share the curation rewards back, with the delegators (65% of the rewards, although this can be discussed on a case by case basis) and the team (15% of the rewards). You can also consider supporting our witness @stem.witness (HiveSigner link).