Minnows: The Steemit Curation Technique That Will Actually Make You Money (and You Don’t Have to Be First in Line)

You can make money from curating quality content on Steemit, but it has nothing to do with voting or commenting.

I’ve been on Steemit for a little more than a week now. I’ve tried writing what I thought was quality content, I’ve tried curating and commenting. I’ve even tried to game the curation system as so many articles have recommended.

I had one post voted on by a whale or dolphin so it did okay, but it was practically a cut and paste job – actually a digest version of a longer article. It was a fascinating subject, but I spent less time on that than anything, but it was technologically related, a quick read, and had an intriguing title and an eye-catching picture borrowed from the original article. The carefully researched and thought-out stuff I wrote got a few encouraging comments from fellow minnows, but for the most part when I try to put myself out there, all I’ve found on Steemit is crickets.

It seems that fascinating stories about humans and technology interfacing can be very popular – if you happen to get the attention of a whale. See my one successful article as an example, and another by @rampart that was similarly little more than a catchy title, a good picture, and a link.
https://steemit.com/philosophy/@goose/stanford-s-virtual-reality-lab-become-a-cow-then-be-sent-to-a-slaughterhouse
https://steemit.com/cyberpunk/@rampant/mit-creates-on-skin-electronics-interface

Stories like that that haven’t already been covered don’t come around that often, so I spent many hours trying to see if there is some intersection between what does well and what I want to write about. But I didn’t have much success. So instead I started to do a lot of reading about cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. I didn’t get that deep into it. I just wanted to know what was going on out there.

What I realized is that the real opportunity for me on Steemit came from sifting through all the information on what to invest in and when. I read about syscoin and saw how many respected people think it’s seriously undervalued and this is a good time to buy. I bought some a few days ago and it’s already gone up quite a bit. I’ve learned that NEM and Maidsafe are probably good buys as well. I’ve learned that IOC, Solarcoin, Radium, and Waves may also be good buys. I’ve learned that opinions vary wildly on Dogecoin and Dash but they are interesting as well.

I’ve learned that Bitcoin may be due for another nosedive, but that economic uncertainty may cause it to remain stable or go up, though the consensus seems to be that in the long run it’s still greatly undervalued. I’ve learned that quite a few people are stockpiling gold and silver right now too.

I learned that it’s best to check both Bittrex and Poloniex when buying or selling because the price difference can be significant.

I learned that now is probably a great time to buy Bitshares (before Sept. 1) and that it has to be in OpenLedger. This is because everyone who’s anyone on Steemit (they are admittedly biased) thinks Bitshares is poised for a major move upward, and anyone who has Bitshares in OpenLedger before September 1st will also get free Peerplays tokens.

I learned about the Blockpay ICO starting August 23.

I learned about the Zcash launch on October 27.

I found an easy tutorial on how to set up steem mining on Windows, so now I’m mining steem.

I learned that the two easiest coins to mine may be Gridcoin and Hodl, and that you can mine a CPU-intensive coin and a GPU-intensive coin on the same machine. I learned that cloud mining is mostly a scam, though nicehash may be an exception.

I learned that when Zcash launches, for mining it you may do better with a Raspberry Pi cluster than a $5000 setup.

I am checking out everything I read but I am not doing any kind of careful analysis. I have neither the skills nor the time to do it. I am trusting the wisdom of the very knowledgeable crowd of whales and dolphins around here.

You can get the kind of investment information on Steemit that people get in investment newsletters they pay thousands of dollars for.

So the real curation we should be doing, while we wait for our brilliant posts to start rising to the top, is sifting through all the information about the blockchain world to see how we can maximize our investments, even if we have very little to start out with now.

I propose a new tag called minnows-curation that minnows can use to share valuable information with other minnows that is not likely to rise to the top.

What do you think?