Interviewing the SteemSTEM Language Curators @sco
The SteemSTEM Curators
What do they do? Well, their tasks include searching for new STEM authors, evaluating and reviewing STEM articles, conducting thorough searches for plagiarism and suggesting whether or not a STEM article should be upvoted and supported by @steemstem.
A community gets bigger and stronger as its members work together, get to know each other, learn from each other.
Introducing @sco!
In this post @sco is interviewed by @katerinaramm!
If you have any extra questions or thoughts, feel free to let someone from the PR team know!
Let's Read what Sco has to say!
Q - Hi @sco, thank you for taking time to reply to our questions! You have been on steem for a long time, since November 2017! We would like to start this conversation by asking; What is your real (first) name? What do you do, where are you from and how did you get to know about steem?
A - I am called Sco by quite a lot of people in real-life as well, so let's stick to that. ;-) I'm from Austria, originally from the Tyrolean mountains, but I'm living in our capital Vienna for more than 10 years now.
As a profession, I am a post-doc scientist in the field of food toxicology at our local university... for now, as my contract expires next year. I found Steem in the internet. Haha. No, for real - I just bought my first few coins, and back then I was all about surfing the net for information... some youtube video pointed me to Steemit, and I immediatly wanted to test that stuff.
Q - How long have you been a language curator for SteemSTEM?
A - I founded @de-stem in Feb. 2018, and have been curating since then.
Q - Do you curate only posts written in German?
A - Yes. I read English STEM posts out of interest as well, but I have no time. In general. So I don't do English curation.
Q - How and when did it all start with SteemSTEM and your curator duties??
A - When I arrived at our blockchain, I was thinking about what to write about. I chose science quite quickly, as it's the one thing I'm definitely qualified to write about. In my introduction post, some comments told me to use #steemstem as a tag, so I did. After posting, I went to bed, and in the morning my post had 300 votes and was worth 40$. SteemSTEM's trail voted me, and I fell in love with the project. Initially, I have to admit this, it was all about the rewards. But then I started to see the bigger vision of bringing science to the people without the often incompetent middleman - and that motivated me to get involved with the project, even though at that time, this meant less rewards.
Q - Do you read English STEM posts? Have you seen significant differences between topics chosen by German speaking authors?
A - Yes and yes. These days, we have very few German STEM authors, so the topics are much more narrow. In English, we still have a very broad range despite the constant loss of authors. Also, a larger proportion of German STEM posts seems to be about computer/informatics-related topics.
Q - What is the first thing that you take into consideration when curating?
A - Easy: Plagiarism. If I smell plagiarism (and as a university assistant, my nose is well trained), I dig into that. Next important things are: Is the topic STEM enough, is the article well-written and readable, etc.
Q - Tell us something that really gives you a great first impression when you see a SteemSTEM post. (It could have to do with the chosen topic, images, structure, layout, etc.)
A - An orginal, new interesting topic, an appealing layout of the article. A post should catch my interest, and look promising enough that I want to read it instead of just being obliged to read it.
Q - Do you have a favorite scientific topic that you have fun reading and reviewing over any others? Do you get a chance to read about it often?
A - Obviously anything that relates to my prime expertise, bio-science. At the moment, there is exactly one active German author in that field, who is @chappertron. Thanks he is very active.
Q - Tell us something that really makes you disappointed or angry when you see a SteemSTEM post. (It could have to do with the chosen topic, images, structure etc)
A - A loveless google translation of some spanish/english/whatever post to German, which was even rejected by the original language curators for plagiarism. No surer way to get me flagging.
Q - What would be your advice to both the old and new authors who wish to join SteemSTEM but do not know where to start? Do you have a channel for German speaking STEM authors?
A - We have a german sub-channel in the steemSTEM-discord, yes. Feel free to connect there. But the better way of connecting would probably be to read de-STEM posts and leave thoughtful comments below. That starts discussions, might give you the right followers and gets your name into our heads.
Q - What is the meaning of your username, how did you choose it ?
A - As said above, my oldest friends call me Sco. To explain it, I would have to tell you my real name... ok, dammit, it's Georg. In Austria, a common nickname for "Georg" is "Schorsch" (pronounced "shorsh"). So at school, I was called Schorsch. I fucking hated it. Someone started calling me "Skorsch" instead. Sounded better, but not quite good enough. So when we discovered the internet (yes I'm old), and I had to choose usernames for games and mail adresses, I had to come up with something cooler. "Sco" as an anglizised abbreviation for "Skorsch" popped up in my mind, I chose it, it stuck. I'm carrying the name around since I'm 14, and I still like it.
Q - What do you enjoy to read or write about? Lately you have not been so active as an author, why?
A - I am reading science and politics. I was writing science, and I will do it again I think. But at the moment, I feel so overwhelmed by work that I don't have the time to write high-quality stuff. Sometimes I write more casual things from my secondary account (@doctor-cog-diss) though, e.g. about nextcolony, which I am playing as well.
Q - If you could interview anyone from SteemSTEM, who would it be and ask him/her one question now?
A - Apart from asking @egotheist if he can get his ass back to writing, I would ask @lemouth if maybe another meetup is in the planning...
Q - If you had more time to spare, how would you spend it?
A - Nextcolony, steemmonsters, my family, my work... Ahm noooo. Of course, I would write fine articles about toxicology. Of course. ;-)
Q - What does Science and SteemSTEM mean to you?
A - Science is my real-life profession, but also my compass through the mist of halftruths that populate our world, especially the virtual world. SteemSTEM could (hopefully) develop to be the tool to bring that compass to the masses.
Q - Who are your top 3 favourite scientists and why are they so ?
A - John Nash for game theory, Einstein for the infinite pool of very cool and probably faked quotes, and Jimi Hendrix for his research on how to fucking rock.
Q - If you could have any job in the world, what would you choose?
A - Lord Emperor of the Universe, obviously.
Q - Besides SteemSTEM, do you have any other Steem-related activities you would like to share? Can we find/follow you on other social media platforms?
A - I run toxblog.eu and a twitter account, but as I didn't write much recently, they both must look quite deserted atm. So sad.
Q - What is your greatest wish for SteemSTEM?
A - To somehow get the push we need to reach much more people than just our inner cercle of Steem science nerds. The tool is great, the reception is so far quite poor, let's be honest about that one.
Q - Where do you see SteemSTEM in 5 years?
A - As an optimist, I would see us in collaboration with researchgate, arXiv and the likes to gather professional STEM bloggers from everywhere. Am I an optimist? I don't know...
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To answer your question (there is no need to interview me for that ;) ), another meetup is possible, if there is an interest from the community and if we have a place to visit in mind.
I recall that the LHC is shutdown for another year so that it could be a nice opportunity to go down once again. I have connections to organize our a private visit for SteemSTEM inside there. This is however a lot of work and energy required to organize it, so that I am quite unsure about it (SteemSTEM is already taking so much of my time...). Anyways, my mind can be set in one way or the other easily ;)
Thank you! It's kind of empty to just look at the bottom line. You really never know who reads your material, and what impact it will have on them. The stuff is posted forever. It's a gift "to the people".
Nice interview, as usual, @katerinaramm
I wish we will manage to get there! There is still a lot of work to do!
I will eventually come back at some point, @sco. Just have to deal with a lot of personal issues first.
I hope that is not anything (too) severe. I am looking forward to your return!
Nice Interview Georg, resteem!
de-stem 4 ever!
Of course!
thx
No worries!
Also ich schreib auf Steemit vor allem auf Deutsch, weil die Leute das brauchen und mir wesentlich mehr Sympathie entgegenkommt. Natürlich wärs besser Posts zweisprachig zu schreiben wie z.B. @siphon und @vikisecrets das machen.
Das kommt finde ich ein bisschen auf die Länge der Posts an. Relativ kurze Posts lassen sich zweisprachig gut machen, bei längeren Geschichten wird das aber echt mühsam - da poste ich lieber 2 Mal, einmal auf Deutsch und dann einmal auf Englisch.
The honor was all mine. Thanks for finally interviewing me. ;-)
The reason of this late interview is because your nickname comes at the end of the alphabet :)
I just hope I have the capacity to attend the next meetup coming up whenever...
For now, there is no "next meetup" yet. So that you have time to get prepared ;)
Can i delegate power for Curation awards, back me..??
Sure you can.
You can delegate to the @steemstem account. Every week, 65% of the curation rewards are shared with the delegators. If you plan to delegate a lot and would like to have different terms, feel free to reach me out on the SteemSTEM discord server.
Ok Don i delegated, fund every week reserved me reward
Delegating options not, work
You can try here directly. It should work. Also note that the payment script is automated and the rewards are shared proportionally to the delegation.