After a slow start, I have begun my role as a Steem Community Curator with the @steemcurator07 account
Pixabay license, source
And They're Off!
On April 30 and May 1, after a comment and post on the blockchain indicated that keys had been transferred, I was looking for the key. But as of the evening of May 1, it had still not arrived. Eventually, an e-mail arrived asking me to confirm receipt, so I replied immediately.
The funny thing about that email is that the mail header showed that it was sent on April 30. It seems that the message had been bogged down in a mail gateway for something like 24 hours. I'm old enough to remember when that was common with e-mail gateways, but we don't seem to see it very often these days.
Anyway, I replied immediately and received another quick reply that the key would be on its way. It arrived in the early afternoon (US/Eastern time) on May 2. I tested the login right away to verify that it worked, and later that evening began voting on posts. I have been voting on more posts, today, too.
First impression: Finding quality posts that are exclusive to Steem and also in the topics I'm focusing on is hard. Really hard. There are plenty of decent quality posts, but on many of them, the appraisal process reveals that they are also posted on one or more other platforms. It turns out that most of the time being spent is to find out whether a post is exclusive to Steem or not.
I started off with the idea of curating Steem's various categories and communities for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathematics) and Classical-Music. But I quickly learned that there's not enough unique content there to get through 10 or more votes per day, so I expanded and started looking at other tags too. The basic "search" process that I'm following goes something like this:
- Check #steemexclusive tag
- Check STEM communites ( Popular Stem, SteemSTEM, and STEMGeeks )
- Check the Classical Music community.
- Check the category tags for #classical-music, #secretsoforganplaying, #science, and #technology
- Check my other communities
- Check the feed for @steemcurator01
- Check the #music category
- Scroll through all new posts
- In any of those places, when I find a post that I like, I go through some additional checks... (is it on Hive, grab some random text strings and search google for them, do a Google image search for unsourced images in order to look for plagiarized images, etc...)
If anyone's reading this and wondering how to get me to notice your quality post, the easiest thing you can do is probably to tag it with #steemexclusive. (Of course, this implies that it really is exclusive to the Steem blockchain, so please use the tag correctly.)
Another thing you can do is to reply to this post, or one of my weekly curation status posts with a link that you'd like me to see. It can be yours or someone else's. If it's a non-English language post, please put a few sentences of English in the comment to describe the post. I don't promise that I'll vote for the post, but I'll look over as many as I can. You're welcome to suggest links on any topic, but since I'm focusing on STEM and Classical-Music (also folk), links on those topics are probably the most likely to get my curation votes.
Goals
As stated in my community curator application, my curation goal is to vote for 8-12 posts per day in the STEM communities or categories and 1-2 posts per day in Classical-Music. On days one and two, I haven't been able to find anywhere near that many posts, so if you have any interest in these topics, please do contribute!
Additionally, as also stated in my community curator application, I am voting for up to one post per day from my Curating the Internet series. These are self-votes, but they have beneficiary rewards set to share rewards with reply-authors, and authors of other posts that are included in the series, so the value of that vote is being distributed between myself and other Steemizens. The purpose of this once per day (or less) self-vote is to reward engagement, so please join the discussion on those posts.
Beyond the original application, another goal I have is to keep the voting power of the @steemcurator07 account in the 70-90% range. So far, I have not been voting anywhere near enough to meet that goal, mostly because I spend so much time digging through posts that turn out to be posted on multiple platforms.
Conclusion
I'm looking forward to the remainder of the month. Happy posting. I'll be looking for your #steemexclusive posts!
Thank you for your time and attention.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.
Steve is also a co-founder of the Steem's Best Classical Music Facebook page, and the @classical-music steemit curation account.
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