Some days ago, I published an article detailing while I really feel like you should get invested with the CTP-token. Even before I had written the article, I heeded my own advise and kept buying CTP-tokens on a daily basis. I tried to do so without pumping the market too much but that also meant it was really hard to get a meaningful amount - there are just so few people willing to sell their tokens. My goals were to get to 10,000 CTP this week and to 20,000 CTP by the end of February. With the current price movement, I think it's now safe to say that I didn't make the 10,000 and I probably won't manage the 20,000 either. Just look at the spread right now, buying meaningful quantities is just super hard:
But this article is not about me complaining about how tough it is to reach my staking goals but rather about what I intend to do with said stake. So far, I've been following @ctpsb's curation trail with my curation account @khazrakh.cpt. With now 9,116 CTP powered up on that account, I feel like it's time to start manual curation with my stake. Why am I going to do this?
To make things clear right away, I don't object auto-votes/following curation trails. I follow them myself obviously and of course I'm grateful for everybody that gave me their auto-vote. Knowing there are at least some votes coming no matter how my article goes is a great feeling of course. Nevertheless, in my opinion, manual curation is where the true value of our rewards system is sitting. I've made that rule for myself, that I'm only voting stuff that I've actually read. I mean we are obviously all looking to earn some rewards with our articles, but me personally, I want to get read as well. If I found out that nobody actually read my articles and I was just voted by bots, I would be very likely to just stop publishing or at least I'd reduce the effort put in tremendously.
To me, that's the key point: The higher quality the articles published on this platform are, the more valuable they are to the people reading them and the more people will actually come back to read more. So if we want to promote quality content, we have to make sure it is rewarded but also that it is actually read before being rewarded. So starting tomorrow, I will remove my follow to the curation trail with @khazrakh.cpt. Instead, I will follow @khazrakh on articles tagged with ctp but I will also do separate curation with @khazrakh.cpt. This part of the curation will be done through the CTPtalk frontend and I will try to target articles recently published in the New tab instead of articles from my follow stream.
The issue with just following your own main account is that this leads to a situation where you always vote the same people. Consequentially, most of the tribe's votes just go to articles that were lucky enough to have the right tag(s) when they got their upvote. By doing some of the curation through dedicated voting in New, I hope to redirect some of my voting power to articles that were dedicated to CTPtalk. This should help to bring more value to actually posting with CTP in mind instead of just adding the tag for additional "free money".
Obviously, everybody is free to decide what to do with their votes themselves, but I can only ask you to consider doing the same as well. Getting some small upvotes can make all the difference between getting more involved or just leaving the platform behind for new authors. If you take the time to even leave a comment, this often times will be all it needs to keep an author going and try to deliver another quality article as soon as possible.
While I'm at it, I want to make a case to change the curation reward system to linear curation just like LeoFinance has done. There, the rewards are always split 50:50 between the author and the curator, no matter when the vote took place, no matter who voted before or afterwards. I'm not saying we need to move to a 50:50 split, but having linear curation rewards is a huge boon to the platform in my opinion.
Without it, the best course of action is to vote as early as possible on articles that will fetch as many votes as possible afterwards. This leads to a situation where it's a lot better in terms of returns to just auto-vote authors that you know will catch a lot of votes and/or follow a curation trail that takes care of that for you. With a linear curation reward system, there's no need for that any more. Ever since that change, LeoFinance manual curation and engagement has gone through the roof for the site. Because of that, I can do my curation once a day and vote articles (or comments!) that I feel deserve my vote, no matter if they were published 5 minutes or 5 days ago.
I'll do manual curation for CTP no matter the system we use for it, but I feel like it would be an (hopefully) easy to implement change that should help to boost interaction throughout the community by a lot.
Either way, I'm really happy I found this great community and I'm looking forward to interacting with all its members and to providing value for it through my manual curation. Things are going fast both for CTPtalk but also for Hive in general right now. It's up to us to make it the best experience possible for everybody and to me, that means reading and interacting with articles as much as I can!
And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!
