Steemit is growing at an incredible pace (500 users per day), this means that is getting harder and harder to find good content and filter through all the spam. Luckily for us the platform has a great feature to fight this problem: Curation.
As some of you already know, Steemit pays you to vote on posts, but you only make money if other people vote too. The intend of this is to filter out spam, plagiarism and crappy content, while featuring good posts on the “hot” or “trending” categories.
A witness responsibility to curation.
In Steemit not all votes count the same; some votes have more weight than others, the more Steem Power a user has the more impact he/she will have when curating content.
There are 19 witnesses who are paid with SP for finding blocks and keeping the network running. Some witnesses are also some of the biggest whales on Steemit, but unlike other whales they have made this wealth by being voted in by steemit`s users, which morally obliges them to give back to all the users. One way to give back is to vote, curate and distribute SP and SBD to deserving users.
I have seen the entire 19 witnesses vote for content and post on comments, some witnesses have auto-voting bots and this is a GOOD thing since it is not humanely possible to be awake and voting 24 hours a day and whales need to vote all the time if poster want to make any meaningful amount of money!
Having said this, next time you vote for a witness make sure that he is an active voter on Steemit.
A dolphins curation strategy
According to one of the most famous writers on steemit, @stellabelle, a dolphin is a user who is not big enough to qualify as a whale but has enough SP to make a difference when voting. I personally consider a dolphin anyone who has between 50m and 200m Vest.
Like a real dolphin, a steemit dolphin needs to be very smart about their votes if they want to make any money. Some dolphins follow whales and try to vote just before them, in my opinion that strategy is not adding any value to steemit curation system; on the contrary it is giving the whales even more curation responsibility.
The best way a dolphin can make some curation SP is by reading the “new” category and voting on good posts that they think will likely become popular, depending on their SP they should vote in the 10-25 min range. By being the firsts to vote they can make a couple of SP per post and also feature good content on the “hot” list so that the whales can come in and give their votes to already “pre-approved” content.
How should minnows curate?
Like it has been stated in the past, curation is not for small users. If you are a minnow and hold less than 1m SP, you should just vote for whomever you enjoy reading. If you want to make some steem you can write valuable content and promote it amongst yours friends on facebook and twitter, if your friends sign up and vote, your post will climb up the “hot” category which will make it more visible for dolphins and whales.
Remember that at this point it only takes one or a couple of very good posts to become a dolphin, so don´t be discouraged if your first post was not found, you will sure have a second and third chance of becoming a dolphin… or maybe even a baby whale one day!