Since I joined Steemit, I have made an effort to support quality content across the platform. There were many great content curators who helped my posts get off the ground, so I want to do that for others.

Unfortunately my life as a PhD student affords me little time to do manual curation, and I've become more busy lately due to research collaborations and paper writing. So I've turned to alternate curation methods.

I've made several posts about curation trail bots, so you can read Part 1, Part 2, and the follow-up article about a modification I made to a bot if you'd like more info. I have been using these bots to trail the accounts of some fantastic curators that I've discovered. I know that I am casting my votes for content that is excellent and represents the best the platform has to offer.

I want to showcase those curators for you in this post so I can draw attention to their efforts. I highly recommend checking out their blogs, and I'm sure if you have some spare SP to delegate, they would certainly appreciate it. Here they are in no particular order:

@mitneb: Encouraging Non-Native English Speakers

The Mitneb Motto:

What would you attempt to do if you knew you wouldn't fail?

I recently came across Steemit user @mitneb, who does daily curation posts where he actively engages Steemians who do not speak English as their first language. She takes the time to upvote their posts and encourage them to improve their skills by posting more blogs on Steemit.

She's also great at picking out new users and upvoting and resteeming promising introduction posts. I always appreciate efforts to scour the depths of new posts in the introduceyourself category, and @mitneb has even more rigorous selection criteria than I do. Kudos to her for supporting Steemians and encouraging them to keep going.

Check out her blog for his daily curation post where she shares her thoughts about the posts she's curated for that day. I applaud his efforts, and my account is happily trailing hers, adding a 5% vote from me to all of the posts he votes on.

@carlgnash: Promoting Quality, Original Content via @r-bot, @humanbot, and @thehumanbot

I first encountered @carlgnash on a Discord server, and I can't even remember which one it was. He encouraged me to submit a reply to a writing contest and to try to outdo his entry, which IIRC took the story in a direction where the characters fell through a cave and ended up on Mars. Anyhow, I digress. Carl is a fantastic curator for @curie. He consistently submits great content for their account to curate, and he has begun a few side projects of his own.

Carl is passionate about promoting content that is not just original in the sense that it's new for that person, but original ideas that are not commonplace on Steemit. Right now, he's using the account @r-bot to promote such content, and more recently he started the @humanbot initiative, where he hands out "badges of originality" to posts he (and his team of curators) deem as truly original. I can definitely appreciate this, because Carl works hard to reward posts that may not pick up much attention from whales, but took much time and effort on behalf of the user.

It's my pleasure to trail these efforts, and I encourage you to do the same. Carl is also looking to recruit new curators to his initiative, but you need to have a history of curating posts that fit his criteria. My account provides an additional 5% vote to each post that both @r-bot and @humanbot vote on. If you're interested in trailing his efforts, you can trail humanbot on SteemAuto!

@gogogadgetupvote: Providing Rewards for Discovery of Great Intro Posts

Inspector Gadget, as I know him, has been in the game of promoting new Steemians and quality intro posts since I first came across his efforts on the platform. He's now stepped up his game by offering daily bounty for other users. He encourages his followers to go browse through introduction posts that are between 12 hours and 3 days old. He's not looking for fresh accounts, but rather accounts that have had some time to mature. I think it's a good way to determine if a user shows interest in maintaining a presence on Steemit. He only considers rewarding posts from users who have interacted with others in the comments, or who have gone on to post another blog to follow up on their intro post.

The Inspector has gone from scouring introduceyourself by his lonesome to recruiting scores of other Steemians to help his cause via his daily bounties. This means that you right now can take parr in his efforts, and you may even get a reward out of it! Check out the rules here, and go follow his account for tomorrow's daily bounty post!

@mikepm74- Promoting Steemit Retention

It seems like every time I join a new Discord server, @mikepm74 is already there. He's an ever-present asset to almost every group, and he has some great ideas for curation. His most recent initiative involves retention, a concept that has jumped into the forefront of many Steemians' focus, as it is becoming increasingly difficult to recruit new users to the platform and actually incentivize them to return for a second post.

Mike, or DJ Mikey Masters, as he's known on Discord, has set out on a brand new initiative called "The Daily Five." Based on SteemSQL queries developed by @carlgnash and a database maintained by @arcange, Mike queries the blockchain looking for posts that have low rewards and are less than 24 hours old in the introduceyourself category. He picks five posts a day to spend high percentage upvotes on. His goal? Provide more reward to entice these new users to return for more blogs.

Retention is a goal we all should work toward. The more users we recruit to the platform and keep on Steemit, the higher the value of STEEM will get. There are many different ways to accomplish this goal, and I believe Mike's effort is a step in the right direction.

If you want to get on board helping retain new Steemians, I'm sure @mikepm74 would love to hear from you!]

Final Thoughts

These are just a few of the efforts that are working to promote quality content, new users, and user retention across the platform. I would love to hear about initiatives that other Steemians have come up with. If you have an initiative that you'd like me to check out, please let me know in the comments. I'm always looking for new efforts to trail!

Alternatively, if you have a post that you believe falls into any of these categories, please share it in the comments, and I'll pass it along to the appropriate curator!

As always, thanks for stopping by!

Images are courtesy of the accounts mentioned in this post.