The LEO Dilemma Part 2: Why I've Changed My Mind About Changing My Curation

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The LEO saga continues. I think we've got a nice and healthy debate going here which was one of the main purposes of my post. I got you in here by using a little clickbaitery because no, I'm not just going to curate content the way I was before.

In fact, I don't think any of us will curate content the way we did before after participating in this discussion.

With a community like ours, curation is a living, breathing organism. Our habits will change with every little action we take, word we read or content we create.


TLDR;

  • I'm still curating LeoFinance content and reading it all the time
  • If you enjoy writing quality content about LeoFinance, keep doing it
  • I want to see more non-LeoFinance content about interesting crypto/finance subjects that attract non-Leo users (again, building a healthier ratio of content)
  • I don't want to see more non-Leo content at the expense of Leo content
  • I think there are a lot of great pieces of non-Leo content getting under-rewarded and under-engaged with. I plan to personally be a part of changing that with my upvotes and with my comments (the intended purpose of my post earlier today)
  • I like debating with all of you and believe our stake is what we use to debate and dictate our feelings about rewards in real-time
  • ♥️🦁

The comments were stacking up in my last post ("Part 1") and in other subsequent posts that I saw follow up to mine (like @hitmeasap). I plan on jumping in and leaving direct comments to as many people as I can, but I also would like to point people back to my longer-winded answer here in this post.

Curation is Not Binary

Humans like to think in binary terms. Black and white.

Curation is far from a binary activity - unless, of course you are using an autovoting bot that simply says yes or no to a set of authors.

With manual curation (the topic of this discussion), we are constantly evolving our methodologies and points of view.

My last post discussed the importance of curating Non-LEO topic posts. This post will play a middle-ground/devil's advocate role.

The first point I'd like to start off with is that curation is not a binary activity. I just stated in my last post that I am going to start giving more weight behind my upvotes (which includes @leo.voter, for better or worse) toward content that is non-LEO related.

With that in mind: I am not ignoring LEO content. Quite the opposite, as I've said in a few comments I've left around. 80% of my content diet is reading LEO-related content.

This means posts.
This means comments.
This means discussions on Discord.
Tweets... etc.

LEO is the primary source of my content diet for a number of reasons but the best example is what we're seeing here in real-time. I want to be the kind of person who hears all of your perspectives.

I believe that this best products are built by having a thorough understanding of the customer and their needs coupled with a healthy bit of narcissism in thinking that I know what you want and need better than you do.

The way Steve Jobs approached building products like the iPhone is not by simply understanding what the customers wanted and needed. He had to extrapolate what they would want and need in the future.

I'm no Steve Jobs but I do like to imagine that I can absorb all of your posts and comments to understand what you desire from this platform and then do my part to make a better experience for you both today and tomorrow.

Where Did My Post Come From?

My post from earlier today came from user feedback. I've seen plenty of people telling me two sides of this story:

  1. Content about LeoFinance is over-rewarded
  2. Content about LeoFinance deserves to be over-rewarded

User feedback drives a lot of my knowledge about the current status of things and also helps me map out where we're trying to go.

In my opinion, there is a glitch in the matrix. An imbalance. A problem that needs some attention.

I want to reiterate that I think LEO-based content is awesome. I want you to keep making it. I said that in my post and I think everyone understood that for the most part.

Seeing people talk about LeoFinance, how it's changed their life and why they enjoy using it is not something I want to see disappear or die off by any means.

So What is The Goal?

My goal is simply to rebalance the ratio of content we see on LeoFinance. I said this in a comment to @hitmeasap: we all get to choose how we vote and we all have an ideal vision of what kind of content we'd see on this platform.

To me, my ideal content feed for LeoFinance looks something like this per 10 posts:

8 great pieces of content that have nothing to do with LeoFinance
2 great pieces of content that have everything to do with LeoFinance

In other words: a healthy mix of people discussing content that will drive in readers and new attention and also a collection of content that will teach and inspire those users (and our existing base) about LeoFinance.

We All Believe the Same Thing

After reading over 100 comments from my post and others about this topic, I am happy to report that the #1 impression I got is this:

We all want LeoFinance to succeed.

I think this is fundamental to growing our platform. We all want to see new users. We all want to see more attention. We all want to see more investors and more content creators. Growth is the goal.

The nuances of how we choose to reward content that we see on the platform is always going to carry some level of debate. That is good. That is healthy.

I keep mentioning Hitmeasap, but here is something he replied to me with which adds a lot of perspective to this discussion:

"People having success on LeoFinance are likely to talk about LeoFinance with friends and family, and they are likely to share their experiences outside of LeoFinance.

This leads to more users and we will be able to keep the users once they arrive as they have joined because of real stories and numbers instead of hoax and bs-stories like we've seen in the past regarding Steem for instance.

People are not likely to join LeoFinance and become a contributing user because of a good article they read about BTC. They will consume the content, or in other words read the article before they close it and move on to the next.

People are more likely to join and contribute if they can relate to something personal, like another Lion's experience for instance.

That's what I'm talking about in terms of user experience. Users will be rewarded for their efforts with time, leo-related or non-related content, because sooner or later, it will happen naturally.

Like I said in my previous comment. I just hope this will become more balanced and not make it so LEO-related content are not being curated at all, because that would be a very bad move." - by hitmeasap

I really enjoy this perspective and he actually did make me loosen my grip on the reins a bit in terms of how I would curate (hence the partially clickbaity title of this post).

This idea of "success stories" is something that @taskmaster4450 also reiterated in his comments. I believe in this phenomenon as well and I don't want to see this dampened or die off in any way, shape or form.

Again, I think people are taking this discussion too literally. Many are looking at this in binary terms: either you have LEO content or you have non-LEO content.

I don't believe that even slightly. I think we will always have a mix and I know that I will personally always curate content that I believe adds value to LeoFinance.

One of the types of content that I was particularly targeting are these "I powered up x LEO" posts. The majority of these carry maybe 5 sentences of text along with a screenshot of some LEO being powered up.

Intent is a Powerful Thing

Generally, I think intent is a pretty clear thing. When I see a post like the one I just described, I see the intent as farming the rewards pool and milking LEO from whales who like to see people powering up.

I like to see people power up too, but I don't like to see people milking the pool. I know that there's a camp of people here on LeoFinance that also don't like to see people milking the pool (I know this because this has been continuously sent to me in DMs asking why x post earned 80+ LEO for 4 sentences describing "another day I powered up LEO" along with 10 posts prior to it with similar characteristics).

So How Am I Really Going to Curate??

Under the context of intent, I hope to leave everyone with this message about my curation habits: I fully plan on curating both content about LeoFinance and content about general crypto/finance.

I hope all of you do the same, but the value of decentralized content curation is that you get to decide for yourself. Your votes are not binary.

You, me and this entire ecosystem are a living and breathing group of people who generally like a few of the same subjects (crypto, fiannce and LeoFinance). We don't have to be one thing or the other.

My Intent is that we see a more healthy ratio of LeoFinance content to non-LeoFinance content (especially in terms of what earns the most rewards). To @hitmeasap's last point in the above comment:

"I just hope this will become more balanced and not make it so LEO-related content are not being curated at all, because that would be a very bad move."

I hope for the exact same thing. Let's make content creation/curation more balanced.. not weighted unevenly to one side or the other. I don't want to see content about LeoFinance getting squashed. I just want to see the pedestal for other content have a fair shot at being raised to the same level both in terms of rewards AND engagement.


Thank you for bearing with my rambling. After digesting more than a hundred comments about this and thinking about it all day, I felt the need to put my thoughts to paper. I think we're all aligned in terms of our mission here and I simply want to grow and evolve as a curator on this platform. I hope you desire the same and support both LeoFinance content and non-LeoFinance content.

Your stake is your voice, so get out there and tell us what content you believe is beneficial to our platform and what isn't. That's all I ever expect from curators.

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