Hey everyone! I started going through the Curator Applications on the announcement post and just wanted to start out by saying a big THANK YOU to everyone for your big interest in the project. Its great to see that so many others are really passionate about the platform and want to make it a lot easier for new users to get noticed and be rewarded for their content.
We had an astonishing 43 Applications for the position of 10 Curators!
I didn't take the rule of being a max 3 month old account to become a curator as serious as I noticed many users who were older but still active curators had very low amount of SP themselves yet were trying really hard to curate as well as they could. Also reminded me a bit of myself when I was curating with low influence for a long time, so that rule got lifted.
What I wonder about now though, and what I want the community themselves to decide on, is if you are willing to up the Curators from 10 to 20.
Since my Steem Power that I can delegate is roughly over 20k that means that each curator would only receive a total of 1000 Steem Power to aid me with the project and nominate deserving posts they find each day.
Like many others though the hardfork has exceeded many of our expectations of how effective our votes have become, that's why I myself am leaning a bit more towards accepting 20 Curators instead. I also want to change the rules a bit more to be able to support the authors a bit better with increasing both their curation rewards and amount of earnings they receive from finding these undervalued gems of posts. One of the biggest changes would be this one:
30% of the SD from that post will be shared among all 10 Curators, 30% among the curators that linked the winning nominations
would be changed to instead post a compilation of the top 5-10 posts voted within the curation steemit.chat channel daily on my account and distribute the payouts like this instead:
25% of the SD from the post is shared among all 20 Curators, 25% added to the Curators of the 5-10 selected nominations for the compilation posts and 50% of the rest of the SD would go to the authors who are in the compilation.
To avoid any confusion of the newcomers we will also require the Curators to let the authors they nominate know about it and ask them for permission to add an image and link of their posts to the Compilation post.