Currently Steemit feels like an endless stream of rubber duckies that try to look cool but which move too fast to see closely...

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Why upvoting is NOT curation

Curation is still not well understood on Steemit.
Many people that are called curators, focus on up-voteable content, because that is what is rewarded.
Sadly the amount of upvotes does not provide a good signal to find worthwhile posts.
It might be the post was upvoted because of pile on effects, established authors, succesful whale hunting, ...
Even if the upvotes reflect a high quality post, it does not give any signal on what area of interest it is about.
For me as an individual, a 500 USD post that is well written about butterflies, still does not float my boat.
Not relevant to ME ... sorry! Most upvoting lacks FOCUS on a particular theme or topic.
Even the tagging system is not sufficient to reliably find the top content that YOU are interested in.

Irrelevant? Moi?

With the explosive growth of Steemit.com comes a diversification of interests. That in itself is healthy but the inadequacy of the feed systems generate too many "irrelevant" posts. Of course "irrelevant" is highly personal.
We all have different interests, goals and time constraints, so our criteria are different.
Note that irrelevant posts are not necessarily bad posts, but not relevant to the topics I am are interested in.

Too much information equals NO information.

Ideally I want to develop a way to easily find posts that are interesting to my criteria:

• well written (edited, formatted and structured)
• are original ideas related to the idea economy topics (see below)
• go in-depth a (not your standard "7 reasons" clickbait)
• expose me to new ideas around themes that interest me (psyhology, economy, creativity, steemit and it's many potential applications see topics)

What is content curation?

Why do it yourself if someone else did it better? Found this on : http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/

Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition:
They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.
Content curation is not about collecting links or being an information pack rat, it is more about putting them into a context with organization, annotation, and presentation. Content curators provide a customized, vetted selection of the best and most relevant resources on a very specific topic or theme...

The value of content curation

Good curation is about filtering, and discriminating against anything that is not relevant.
Basically it is building a relationship with your audience: you commit to present content that is WORTH THEIR TIME.

Once you fail to provide this filtering, offering stuff that simply does not interest your audience, you lose part of that trust, because you are not a useful curator anymore.

Evergreen content

What is relevant to read should NOT have ANYTHING to do with WHEN it was posted. The problem with steemit is that quality content simply drowns in the feeds and even favorite posts from authors, are disappearing in the abyss.

So we need a roadmap in the absence of a good filter mechanism, (I hope very much that this is fixed in the Alpha version of Steemit, I think it is the biggest problem currently) .

Manually fixing curation for my own purposes: 5 Steps I will take

Beth showed this graph on her blog which I think makes a lot of sense:

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My curation goal: Explain how to adapt to the idea economy

My main theme and sfere of interest can be defined as anything around adapting to the idea-economy.
To do that it will explore what "Future survival skills" a professional needs to develop to achieve a succesful transition to an idea-economy career or business.
I will try to find illuminating case studies that highlight real life or potentially inspiring future models

I will try to curate EVERGREEN CONTENT that is relevant to anyone trying to solve specific problems around
my framework of adapting to the new IDEA ECONOMY.

First priority is to find authors and posts on Steemit.com AROUND THIS THEME.
The goal is to build a reference library Authors, posts, books, youtube videos, steemit book reviews.

Topics

Idea-economy general concepts: What is going on and why do we need to adapt?

Explaining specifically why are things changing.
Why Steemit is an implementation of an idea economy.
Explaining the core economic concepts behind the idea economy and material on how to interpret these new paradigms.
Topics might include:

• Abundance, new technology and its implications, new social organisations,
• economy and new concepts, steemit economic initiatives and development
• Futurism, technology and examples of abundance created through technology
• social topics, collaboration
• steemit economic behaviour

Specific actions you can take to adapt to these changes and develop new skills

psychology, (self) education, techno literacy, Future survival skills.

Examples of adaptation

Real life case studies or ideas around the idea economy, steemit applications and use cases that build on the above ideas.
This will take longer to develop but should document concrete actions a person can take to better adapt to the idea economy.
First of all there are future survival skills. Things that will be more and more needed in the near future and which we are

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Promoting Steemit.com

Obviously the primary goal is to create a specific community around this theme on Steemit.com
This content curation project is meant to discover new (and old) Steemit Authors.
So mainly sources quoted will be posts here on steemit.com

External resources: (books, youtube, external blogs)

There are of course tons of resources that are very useful. If no Steemit sources available a standard library will be made.
Ideally over time we can swap out the links with book reviews and posts by Steemians.

Sense making

Just dumping a whole bunch of links is not curation either. Good curation is about showing context, where does this information fit in the puzzle?
So to avoid wasting YOUR time, a curator should explain briefly WHY YOU SHOULD read it.
Each person has different requirements.
So before clicking on a link there should be an explanation WHY you should click the link. This is the second condition for good curation that is not satisfied with the current feed and upvoting system.

Some authors are interesting, no matter what they write about. But their topics are not necessarily relevant to the goal of this curation post. To keep interesting authors visible I will add a list of authors and commenters who have made relevant contributions. These authors might make you think, craft their posts and are just fun to read no matter what the topic.
The intention is to foster the exploration or recreational reading of other authors who put in the effort.
The author list will also include a brief explanation WHY you should read them.

Sharing

The main advantage will come from collaboration, various people contributing and exchanging information helps a lot to discover new original content. One person will have an individual filter, but several people will puzzle together a much more interesting mosaic of information.

In the absence of an automated solution, I will experiment with a manually updated weekly post.
The steemit reward structure currently only rewards content less than 7 days old. This is a strong disincentive to keep looking at "old" content.
The curation post post is open to anyone to add their own content or other's content through the comments.
To reward authors for useful contributions, readers of the curation post are invited to upvote the comments when people recommend good content (please check before voting).

Even if authors recommend their own post, they add value and should be rewarded IF the posts are relevant to the curation goal of course.
If you find the recommended posts are a waste of time, please DOWNVOTE the comment and EXPLAIN why this content is not valuable to the curation goal.
This way we can generate a true community curation effect as intented.

But it will be curated! Meaning that only posts that are worthwhile (length, quality of writing, clarity and relevance of ideas) will be included in the masterpost . owever if you write about adjacent topics, you are more than welcome to point out relevant posts of your OWN.

Any suggestions? Please put suggestions in the list below as a reply and I will consider them for inclusion in the ground rules.

If you think this is a good idea, I HIGHLY recommend that you define your own curation goal and start high quality curation yourself!

SBD's EARNED BY THE CURATION POST WILL BE SHARED :
I messed up, 100% powerup was selected.
I will guarantee 2 3 SBD prizes

1 winner for best post or author suggestion
1 winner for best re-steem (must explain why you resteemed)

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What else am I missing with this article, agree? Don’t agree? Have suggestions?
I would love to have your comment, maybe you can win some decent money. Anything thought provoking is great. Disagree, fantastic! Let me know! Have a question? Even better, a great question is sometimes better than a page long comment!

So please comment, question, challenge and RESTEEM to get as many people in the conversation as possible.