The New Curie Discord Channel and How To Use it - A Curator's View

If you haven't heard, Curie has moved. We have said Adios to steemit.chat and have joined the Discord movement.

You can now find the Curie group on Discord at this link:

https://discord.gg/guxqEfQ

Upon clicking that link you will be taken to the General Channel of the Curie Discord Server. This acts very much like the general channel over on steemit.chat. This is a place where you can review the current guidelines of Curie's curators, and get a feel for what it takes to get a curie vote.

You can also interact with other fine Steemians, and some of our curators hang out there as well. Same rules apply here. The general chat is not for post promotion, and you should not ask to be Curied. If you post great original content, Curie will find you.

What's New?

Curie now has a Post Promotion Channel. But it isn't any usual Post Promotion Channel, It is Curie's Post Promotion Channel. There are no guarantees that any curators will be looking in that channel, however, we might check it out from time to time to see what you all are dropping there.

I want to spend some time talking about MY idea of what should be in the Curie Post Promotion Channel. This is only one Curator's opinion, and does not reflect the opinion of any other Curie Representatives.

Let's assume for a minute that you are posting in the Curie Post Promotion Channel in hopes of getting a curie vote for that post. Because you think it is an exceptional post and deserves an extra boost.

Let's face it, most posts are not exceptional. This post, really isn't exceptional. We are looking for the best of the best. Posts that add to the experience of being in the community.

So, What makes an exceptional post? Well. Let's start with the Curie Guidelines verbatim.

Guidelines - Jan 10th

1. Verified and engaged authors only who have been consistent without much success of late. Focus is on new authors who have made few good posts, but haven't been discovered yet. Curie is unlikely to vote for the same author more than once (especially in quick succession) or for the high REP author unless the post is truly exceptional.
2. Posts must be more than 150 minutes old, but less than 24 hours, with maximum $10 pending payout.
3. Only original content. Articles, art, poetry, videos, recipes, etc. that appear first on Steemit. (I.e. no reposts of older work) Please check for plagiarism and reposting before submitting. Content must be exceptional and unique.
4. No Steemit-related, religious or political posts.
5. Removed as it only has bearing for Curators.
6. English posts only.

Alright, so let's take a few of these guidelines individually.

Number 1. Consistent without much success. This basically means that authors need to be posting on a reasonably regular basis. Curie has occasionally voted on second or third posts by an author, even one exceptional first post received a vote, however these people also were very active in making comments, both on their own posts as well as the posts of other people. The key is to be an engaged community member, but not having much success as of late. This is going to mostly exclude Introduceyourself posts, of which there are currently many in the Post Promotion Channel.

Number 2. Post Age. For the purposes of this post, let's just consider the oldest a post may be is 24 hours. We are looking to discover posts while Curie can still get the post up on the hot or trending page so that other people can see it as they browse through the feeds. If you are posting something in Curie Post promotion that is over a day old, it won't garner a lot of attention from the curators.

Number 3. Original Content. This should be self explanatory. Curie does not reward content that is not your own period. And in cases where it is your own, but you have posted it elsewhere and that prior post is more than a few days old, Curie will pass on it. In the cases of copy/paste posts that are not your own content, curators are highly likely to report you to Steemcleaners. So don't chance it, create original content for Steem and avoid this issue entirely.

Number 4. No Steemit, Religious, or Political Posts. This one is pretty self explanatory. We don't look at posts with content that is specific to these realms.

Number 6. English Only. There are community Curators working in other languages, but for the Big Curie vote, English only.

Now, these are the general guidelines. But what about our post promotion channel?

There are two ways we can look at the post promotion channel. Well, three I suppose. Just throwing up posts because that is what you do everywhere would be the third, but let us try to hold ourselves to a higher standard. This is Curie after all.

So lets say you are looking to get your own post curied. Well... I suppose you can try that. But Curie curators don't get to get their own posts curied, so promoting your own posts seems like a little bit of a bad idea. In fact, that's the first thing I look at from the post promotion channel. If the author is the same as the person posting in the channel, I pass on by. Most people think everything they pump out is fabulous, we are not the best judges of our own content. I want to see content that is being submitted by other people, people who saw an awesome post and wanted to get it credit.

That brings me to the second use of the post promotion channel. Top Curators are enabled to nominate up to three new curators each week. We may find ourselves going through the post promotion channel and looking for posts that were brought to us by other Steemians. Steemians who may be interested in becoming curators. If we find people in the channel who are consistently bringing us exceptional content that really does deserve a curie vote, that submitter may be approached by a Top Curator with the possibility of being mentored into a curator role.

So what do you want out of the Post Promotion channel? Do you want just another spam folder full of every link that anyone happens to drop there? Or do you want a channel where you can find exceptional posts that are a treasure trove for the curators to sort through?

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We have an opportunity here to change how the post promotion channel is used. Make it something that is a useful place for everyone to find quality content that they want to read and engage with. I think we can do it. Will you join in the movement to make post promotion worth visiting?

Let's make it happen!!