One of the aspects of steemit that makes me sad is the ephemeral nature of the platform.
Everything is so shortlived. It is like Twitter with a thousand characters.
This to me is at odds with the goal of steemit to promote, encourage and reward quality content.
The homesteading community on steemit is a perfect example of this issue.
Homesteaders have spent many thousands of hours researching, writing, formatting and photographing excellent posts that in the majority of cases are read and voted on by only a couple of dozen people at most.
The majority of those views will happen in the first 24 - 48 hours, then quite rapidly those posts drift into obscurity never to be seen again.
Of course they will exist on the blockchain and can be discovered at any time by search engines. But in the most part that won't happen.
This is such a shameful waste.
Quite often I remember an article I want to look at again but even with AskSteem.com it is usually very difficult to find a specific post.
Although steemit is built around the posting of quality content, it certainly is not designed around the finding of content.
At the moment I just store the links to my favourite articles in a spreadsheet. But that is just for me.
Therefore I want to try an experiment in meta-curation.
I want to compile The Steemit Guide to Homesteading as an ever evolving reference to all the best, most informative and well produced posts on all aspects of homesteading.
The limitations of steemit - particularly the 7 day edit rule - will make this quite challenging. But with a bit of nifty footwork I think we can make it work.
My plan is to produce a Master Index Post linking to individual posts for each of the main homesteading subject areas.
Those Subject Posts would contain a brief introduction to the subject and then links to the best posts on the subject. The Subject Posts might also contain links to the key organisations and relevant books.
By their very nature these Subject Posts will need to be updated regularly, and reposted, as new posts appear that are worthy of inclusion. The Master Index Post would have to be regularly reposted to keep up with the changes to the Subject Posts.
This might seem a bit cumbersome but I do want to keep the Guide within the steemit platform rather than taking it to a more manageable third party site.
Initially I would edit the Master Index Post and the Subject Posts. But I am hoping that as the project evolves 'subject specialists' might be found who could take on the updating of their particular Subject Post.
While I read a significant number of homesteading posts, I am sure there are many I miss. So I will be looking for members of the homesteading community to track down and put forward posts in the comments of each Subject Post that they think should be included.
To encourage this curation effort I will be upvoting as much as I can people who submit suitable posts for consideration.
There will of course need to be selectivity about which posts are included. There would be some basic criteria a post must meet for inclusion. For example it must be original, it must have images sourced, it must contain a certain amount of text and not just a YouTube link etc.
I am wondering if it should be that people can only submit other people's posts for inclusion as a first line of filtering. But I am undecided on this - what do you think?
The age of the posts would not matter. If they are more than 7 days old they could not benefit from any more upvotes arising from inclusion in the Guide. The authors could gain however from the general exposure to their blogs.
The Steemit Guide to Homesteading : Subject Headings
As a starting point these are the main Subject headings for the Guide. It is likely that many of these will need to be split into second level Subject Pages quite quickly as more posts are found.
Please let me know in the comments if I have missed anything obvious.
General
Finance
Land
Building & Shelter – Construction
Energy
Water
Food Production – Growing
Food Production – Livestock / Beekeeping
Food Production – Preservation / Canning
Food Production – Bread / Dairy / Fermented Foods
Health & Medical
Crafts - Spinning, Weaving, Knitting, Soapmaking
What do you think of this idea?
Is it workable? Is it worthwhile? Any ideas for improvement?
You might also be interested in some of my other posts :
Two hundred cabbage plants and a couple of beautiful alpacas
Living in my own little Steemtopia : why I don't Self UpVote
Homesteaders & Preppers on steemit - 230 members and rising - v9 [08 Oct '17]
SteemTowns - connecting the virtual with the reality - would it be possible?
[graphic by @pennsif]