Curie is a Solution to a Problem it Can't Solve- My Experience

I’ve been thinking carefully about what to say for #mycuriestory, or if I should even be writing a story at all. It’s been over a week now since my post was upvoted by Curie, and I have nothing but thanks for the people over at Curie and respect for their mission statement. I should give thanks @lordkingpotato for submitting my post in the first place, and I’ll be expressing thanks to another member of Curie later on in the post.

I’ve been interested in analysis for a long time of all kinds, and I’m extremely fond of youtube videos reviewing and analysing and otherwise giving thoughts on all manner of media for years now. For the longest time it has been something of an aspiration of mine to join their ranks, since I felt that anime and JRPG discussion, both media I engage with more than most anything else, didn't have enough representatives either on youtube or on the internet at large. And up until 2018, I always assumed that I wasn’t ever going to get noticed, let alone make money on these endeavours, unless I was on either youtube or patreon.

As such for the past few years I’ve been pinballing between wordpress blogs, forums, youtube, patreon, and likely some other websites too on my path to find an endeavour that’s suited for me. While I received some attention on youtube, I quickly realised that I am currently lacking the capabilities to make videos with a quality I am happy with, so I have recently returned to writing. But it wasn’t until I discovered cryptocurrencies around January of this year that I realised I had far more opportunities available to me than I had ever previously imagined.

I won’t go over how excited I felt first learning about the likes of Bitcoin, as I imagine we’re all excited about the potential future (or at least, potential asset gains) that Bitcoin might pave the way for. Needless to say, Bitcoin was a gateway for me to learn about the cryptocurrency space at large. And not long afterwards, I discovered Steemit. And I immediately adored the idea, and spent the days after finding the site and signing up to it researching everything I could find out about it, trying to understand it as best I could. A fairly tall order, as it feels like there’s still things I need to learn.

If you look back through my post history, however, you’ll see that I took a roughly two month gap break between my post on Persona 5 and the post before it. Part of that was me waiting for the new anime season to start, which was the main reason I returned in the first place. Another part of that is that the website’s design had simply left me feeling pretty discouraged.

The way Steemit currently is, I think it’s a discouraging site for many people, and I’m sure that’s why groups like Curie exists in the first place. That every post, every comment has an upvote associated with it can be discouraging enough on other social media sites like reddit and facebook, where there’s other people who have more ‘popularity points’ than you. But having a monetary value assigned to almost every action is at once awesome and scary to think about. This isn’t helped by two forces that groups like Curie are trying to fight- Whales and Bots. It flat out feels unfair to me that a post can be put to the top of a trending tab in front of thousands of eyeballs, where it is more likely to receive even more rewards on top of its already unearned rewards, and that even if people don’t like the post they are incentivised to upvote anyway to earn curation rewards. Even if Bots were removed from the platform by the Steemit developers, it still feels like Whales or insular groups could promote each other in private by buying and selling votes, creating a system where the rich get richer thanks to the way Steem Power sort of grows itself. And it just feels odd to me that the promotional tab implemented by the developers never seems to get talked about or see any use.

I’m not sure how 100% accurate all that is, but to me, that’s how Steemit felt to me. A great idea with too many questions regarding the ethics of its users and apparent loopholes in the system left in developers. So when I saw that one of my new posts, only my third after returning from my hiatus, had received a huge amount of upvotes and a high payout, I assumed the worst. Surely I was being tricked into some kind of elaborate scam, yes? Were bots or whales upvoting me without intervention on my own part to entice me into using their services?

Curie is an awesome organisation, and the more I read up about them, the more I appreciated their mission statement, and I think it’s going to be groups like Curie that will give this platform the value it needs to survive in the long term, at least if Steemit’s core design remains the way it is. They gave me some hope for the future of Steemit as a platform, and in a broad sense, that’s the most important thing about them. But it also makes me sad that Curie even has to exist in the first place, and in a way, I almost wish they didn’t.

What makes me excited about Steemit is the potential for hundreds of thousands of people, and potentially more in the future, to be able to determine what is truly valuable content, free of google and facebook algorithms and advertisers promoting certain content, and free of the content creators themselves having to insert product placement into their own content, because the platform itself directly pays them with a decentralised token. Following that, those deemed the best content producers on the platform would then be able to curate their own community with higher value upvotes. But being able to buy Steem power directly before you’ve even proved yourself to the community just feels like a huge loophole to me. Maybe that speaks to my lack of understanding of economics, but to me, being able to buy curation points or Steem Power rather than earning Steem Power almost seems to go against the spirit of Steemit in general. Or at least, it goes against what I would like Steemit to be in a perfect world. The promotion tab feels like the perfect necessary evil to me- a tab that separates the artificially promoted content from the community upvoted content, but the current way Steemit operates seems to put the artificially promoted content to the top of both tabs. I’ve purchased a small amount of Steem Power myself recently, but mostly as a means to understand the platform better as well as support it, since I understand that the Steem token’s value comes from investment.

This makes Curie a necessity, in a sense, but it also makes the act of curation, something which should be a community effort, more centralised, one where a small group of people determine which posts have value. And if there ever comes a point where Curie, or a curation group similar to Curie in its size and mission statement, starts becoming corrupted itself via whatever loopholes may pop up in the future I’ll probably lose most of my faith in Steemit. Right now, I don’t believe that to be the case, so I am extremely thankful for the presence of Curie right now, and I wouldn’t for a second want to come off as ungrateful- but I also have to keep in mind that I may not be as positive towards Curie had I not learned about them precisely because they, in essence, paid me. Since I hadn’t made any dealings with Curie to get my post upvoted I know that what they did for me really did come out of a genuine appreciation for my content, but I also have to bear in mind that part of the reason Curie doesn’t seem to get any negative attention is because most people discover Curie, from what I can tell, from being paid by Curie- had I learned about the group prior to being upvoted by them, I may not have been able to distinguish them from the unethical bots and whales, and might have assumed that there’s some dealings behind the scenes. But I’ve essentially been robbed of that potentially negative first impression. Although, since it took me a few hours to even discover why my post had been upvoted in the first place, you could almost say that my first impressions were, in fact, negative.

There is one reason why I might be coming off as somewhat melancholic in this post compared to other posts in this tab- and that’s a matter of the community in general. I knew that just because my post was upvoted and featured, that I wasn’t likely to become any bigger of a deal in the community than what I already was. My posts do receive slightly more attention now, but only by a few single extra digits in upvotes, views, and SBD cents, and my comments have all but ceased. And the comments are what get me more than anything else- the comments are how I know that I truly provided content that others consider valuable, and yet, not one of the comments I’ve yet received on Steemit have been what I myself would consider valuable, not even on the post that got upvoted in the first place. I won’t name specific commenters, as I’m happy that they took time out of their day to comment anything at all. Yet there’s plenty of one sentence commenters, or commentators saying something positive with no substance at all (that honestly come off as a little sycophantic) or even comments left by people who I’m not even sure read the post in question given what they had to say. When I write analysis, I consider getting my opinion out there to be less valuable than the potential discourse that opinion and those ideas could create, yet so far I haven’t been able to have a single discussion with another Steemian about Caligula or any of the other anime I’ve talked about.

My very first post following my introduction received a comment pointing out that my post was somewhat long and could possibly use some more images- and you’ll notice that it’s criticism I’ve taken to heart with almost all of the posts I’ve made since then. It was useful advice. I think we, as a Steemit community, have to be open to more critical discourse on this platform. Because for as bad as some websites can get, sometimes Steemit makes me miss the likes of the youtube comments section, which can be just as intelligent, insightful, and hilarious as they can be vile, stupid, and useless. And right now Steemians feel very greedy- complimenting you as if cloying for those upvotes and follows, and sometimes it feels like all or most of my followers only come from people wanting me to follow them back, because I sure don’t have 60+ people looking at my posts, let alone upvoting or commenting. Not to mention, it's very difficult to remain following even people whose content I want to keep up with, since the feed can very quickly get clogged up with resteems, and you can only see about 3-4 posts on screen at once anyway. This makes it pretty difficult for me to comment on other people’s posts, too- sometimes it can feel like anything less than a pure compliment is weird or unwelcome on another person’s anime post. There’s a silence like people would rather I leave, or like they have no idea what I’m talking about. But this is the internet, so I know somebody somewhere has to be able to know what I’m talking about. All this might sound a bit elitist of me. However, I think this is largely because I’m used to feeling like I’m the one who knows the least about whatever given topic of conversation in a comment section of any other popular site. I’m far from the smartest or most interesting person out there.

This feeling of being out of place is with the exception of comments I leave on posts by @grarkada, a frosty content creator from youtube whose presence on this platform also motivated me to start posting again. He's a polite guy who has been kind enough to respond to me here despite, I'm sure, being a pretty busy individual who I would assume has Steemit very low down on his list of priorities. However even though he has an established fanbase from elsewhere, that fanbase doesn't seem to be coming over to Steemit when youtube is a much more convenient option for those fans. I feel like the presence of larger content creators coming from other, much more established platforms should be a bigger deal than people on this site are realising, and who knows how many big names in other fields from other websites and industries are continuing to go unnoticed on Steemit. I think it speaks to a culture on Steemit that is very self absorbed, and more concerned with growing their own SBD values than they are in growing within their individual communities or the site as a whole.

This finally brings me to my last point. After a lot of thought I realised that Curie gave me something more valuable than upvotes, money, or even exposure- it gave me @carlgnash. In his comment on my original post, as well as in his author showcase, he gave me the one thing that mattered to me more than anything else- he gave me good feedback. He identified something substantial at the core of the post that spoke to him, something that I hadn’t even realised was that important myself, and he let me know what that was. When I was discussing Otaku culture, I just saw it as a way to frame my discussion, to explain my excitement, the focus was always meant to be on discussing Caligula itself, so I have never even considered the idea that the discussion of the culture might be interesting to people who aren’t as invested in the community as I am. I was honestly worried my discussion was coming off as redundant, as the post was never meant to be aimed at anyone besides invested fans, and I might have cut most of the discussion out for brevity's sake had I given the post another rewrite. Point being, he left me a good comment, something that proves I wrote something coherent that deserves the upvote it got. And it’s actual, real comments and human interaction which is going to be what distinguishes Steemit from a real social media platform used by real people, and a jumble of illegible or irrelevant letters and numbers that serve as little more than an upvote farm for the purposes of turning pure profit. Which is why I’m going to continue to shove whatever small amount value I can muster down Steemit’s throat until the website accepts it, because I know which future I want for this platform.

Whenever talk about Steemit or cryptocurrency analysis pops up, those posts get good comments. That’s what we should be seeing from every community. Part of the problem may just be adoption, and the long amount of time it takes to sign up for Steemit account, as well as the complexities of the site and the little attention Cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin receive, may be contributing to many of Steemit’s current issues even before you take bots and whales into consideration.

This may not have been the Curie story you all wished to hear, because in truth, not much else about my life has changed. I see some of the Curie stories here and I think, man- nothing I post will ever match up to some of these. There’s no way I can write anything so inspiring, I’d mostly just be listing complaints, and I don’t want to be ungrateful. But, in a way, I feel like Steemit could use a bit more negativity. And I will say that the Curie upvote has given me a renewed sense of purpose- it’s still the most amount of attention I’ve really ever received on the internet, and that means a lot to me, and it’s revealed to me that there are people out there who are pursuing strong values and good ethics. The people at Curie have given me good feedback and, ultimately, a renewed sense of purpose.

And no amount of reservations I have can take that away from me.