I appreciate the effort and I think that keeping an open mind will help the community grow in the long run. The idea of gamification is a nice one and I think that once we start more ideas will come up. About the idea of the reports from the curators, it can be done but I am not sure it will help addressing the complaints. I think the issue is that we are being fair but some users want equal votes instead. Treating everyone fairly is different than treating everyone equally. If we flatten the rewards too much to make everyone equal we risk of over-rewarding mediocre posts and discouraging people that actually spent hours doing research and writing good and engaging content. About the engagement, I think we need to create the right user-base. Communities are made by users that share the same values, we need more users that actually are involved in science so professors, scientists, post-docs, students..so we should focus on doing things that would provide value to them and in doing so we also disseminate fact-based knowledge.

> is a part of growing

Let's stop this shrinking trend first :D 
Even that will be a victory

> Curators will get a new task: write a curation report

Too time-consuming, if not rewarded (as for Utopian curation) it will not be viable. Thumbs up for [4], at least 5/5, it must be measurable

> assign them a score

Not bad, let's learn from DaVinci. If there is a questionary, we will end up with basically the same scores - so it's not that efficient. Old good slider could work much better.

> Honor Members and Mentors selflessly help others to create better content, and do this not for the rewards

This point I don't completely understand. Why there is a "sense of shame" when we speak about the rewards? If there is enough voting power (and there is), and if those people are the core/foundation of the community (they are) - why is it bad to make them stronger. Upvote for them = more power to them = more power to us 

> The Honour Members will be assigned the task of tracking and scoring the exemplary comments that are worthy to be rewarded.

Booring :) Those people are funny and interesting. They are doing cool things. Engage them by giving them something funny/ creative/ challenging to do. Call them to post their latest lab diseaster, micro photo, or something interesting that will take 5 min of their time and give them 5$ for that. Or make a contest, bounty...

> Both Honour Members and curators could optionally write reports to posts upvoted below 50%, explaining what could be improved. 

This is the key thing, and it's a simple but yet difficult question:
* What is your product? (elevator pitch, in 30s or 3 sentences)
* What is the size of the community you want to have?
* Can you grow? If yes, who/what provides the power? If not, what is the stable and sustainable product you want to deliver?

When we clarify that, we can see how to achieve those goals

In stem-espanol as of last week, we proposed a reward to those people who provided positive comments in different posts, this I did to increase participation and encourage users. I decided to distribute 2 steem to the 3 users with the greatest participation and, of course, their comments are productive, interesting (without stupid comments). It's just a test and I was in charge of monitoring everything manually and I could see that the comments in the publications increased.

With regard to the writing of a report for those publications that deserve more than 50% of the votes, for me it is not bad, I will do it with pleasure.

And the idea of mentors following up on exemplary and valuable comments, this is great. I hope all this works and increases participation.

everything is slumping here, no doubt... once footing is secured and we can promote the bounce then participation in all the various fields of inquiry here can expand again

I would recommend for us to create maybe a space for people who were considered newbies (never received any form of upvotes) or people who have been blacklisted by steemstem before. Maybe we can create a channel which acts as a classroom for newbies to simply ask questions regarding their post, requesting help from existing mentors (or honour members) or simply would like to request opinions regarding the topics of their article. I know people would like to have a private one-on-one session with their mentor but sometimes, mentors are not around, so it will lead to a constant harassment of other management's inboxes. If a newbie or previously blacklisted people would be able to prove themselves by producing 3 or more worth upvoted article, then they will simply graduate.

It will be easier for people who are new and do not know who to contact or how to start. After they graduated, they will simply leave (or kicked) out of the channel and the channel can only be accessed by management and people who were added. I'm sure, mentors and other honour members would be more productive this way since they were not assigned to a specific person. It's like we were trying to filter as much as possible people who were trying to plagiarise (intended and unintended alike) and the classroom act like a short informal course of writing before they can be a trusted STEM writer. But then again, our system now is pretty solid so...

We will skip our usual generic part of the comment and go straight to the point. We want to congratulate you on your decision to open discussion to the Crowd and we hope it will spawn constructive and productive brainstorming with many participants.

Steemstem as one of the most important projects on this platform should be an example of good practice. And it is. This is the way to push the things even further. We will follow the discussion and probably participate from our personal accounts. Of course, we will support good participants with our upvote - it is not much, but we hope it will help to develop a good atmosphere. 

Best regards

![](https://i.imgur.com/RCtwFLg.png)

Honestly, I don't think having curators to write also reports to justify their votes is a good idea. Most of people here on steemit have a work and their schedule, curators primary task should be to read posts and suggest a vote. If I remember correctly, to get voted posts need the approvation by 2 curators: this is the transparency control.  The best would be to have at least 2 curators per language (or even 3!), to speed up the evaluation process and avoid post getting translate to english, with more work for english curators. Having more curators not only will make evaluating process more transparent and fair, but will also speed up things up.

As for number of posts: there is really little we can do about it. Steem is way down in value and top authors prefer to not invest so much time in writing good and deep content if they are getting a really little reward in STU. This is why all authors posting right now, for me,  should have a "bonus" and getting higher votes when they hit a certain quality level (for example all 65 posts getting a 100 vote, if VP is ok).

Also, as you already suggested, It would be nice to have more comment engaging. This could be done also by voting comments with the steemstem account, maybe with a 20% power, in order to get a nice reward. But this require a lot of effort, more than the honor members, by the authors themselves. In fact, it would be really hard for a guy to track all comments on STEM posts (I think people will just read posts they are interested in) while it's way more easy (and fair) let the authors report (maybe in a specified channel) the posts where valuable comments are written.

Last but not least: I think It would be really useful to have something like a technical comment under low rewarded posts. Some people just think that re-writing things found on wikipedia or other common sources is doing "STEM posts" and this generate lot of misunderstandings and complains. What if on posts voted for less than 65% , steemstem bot use a different post comment, sayng "your reward was low, if you want to know how to improve contact us on the discord"? This way we can make the "question and complain" channel more a "question" one and less "complain/beg" channel.

Anyway, thanks for the hard work on this project, I really admire all of you guys! Let's hope the market will get up soon!

Though I'd love to drop a line in why a post merits more than 50% upvote, but I think it may be a bit time consuming if one is to do that for every posts that one curates at that level. I'm all for rewarding comments, as nothing boosts your level of confidence when people genuinely interact in the comment section  apart from the big curation :) 

About the No 4, I think I do that on a PM basis, I think I should start leaving it out there below in the comment section. 

Thank you all.

I like the idea of curation reports. Curators should specify why a post is worthy of a high vote, otherwise it is unclear if they read or checked the post in detail. Such reports also create implicitely a clearer image of the Steemstem voting standards. 

As steemstem is in sense paying for good posts, there should be some kind of receipt. A curation report makes sense in this context since it directly links the post-vote to a curator.

I really like the general direction this ship is heading in. As is discussed in the post everything should be focused around user engagement. Unlike the other commenters I dont have really much to say, as I think only time will tell how the changes would effect the community.

The only thing I am not totally sure is the report by curators thing. Do you propose this report would be posted in a separate post or in the comments of the said post. I think, personally, that it should be posted in the comments section and be as brief and concise as possible. And I also think it should be done for the posts upvoted 20/20 as they are truly the ones who could use the help. I know this is more work but it can be as much as three bullet points per post. 

Maybe an interesting proposal would be to go more in depth about the posts that are highlighted every week in the "digest" and why they are good.

This combined with "reports" in the comment section would bring general guidelines to the community and also specific guidelines to content creators themselves.

Just some ideas... But in general I like the direction we are heading in. Very good job.

> Curators will get a new task: write a curation report for any post upvoted more than 50%, explaining why this post is a good post and the reasons behind the strong upvote.

Hope this would not discourage curators from giving out big votes? Some of them might be busy with their schedules, and may have just few minutes to curate. And making them to write reports for giving out large votes could make them resort to curating posts with smaller votes - so maybe they wouldn't pass through the stress of writing reports. My thoughts though; I could be wrong.


> The Honour Members will be assigned the task of tracking and scoring the exemplary comments that are worthy to be rewarded. The information will be passed to our curation team for a SteemSTEM upvote.

I believe this would increase post engagement within the community. And people would drop constructive comments.


Nice one. Better days ahead. Change is always constant

Oh, I like the idea of finding and rating good comments.

As long as I write reports on why I suggested a vote, and not why I did not suggest a vote, and as log as I get some extra SP for it that's fine for me. But I am awaiting more detailed instructions how to do it ofc.

i gave up STEM post because it seems like everyone is circle-jerking. After many failed attempt to get the attention of curator(s), i finally got one on my post,  he criticized my post but didnt show me where to improve. In another i criticized but this time, he showed me discord link for me to join the server which i appreciated so  much.

i love Stem post but not everybody like me is good at beating around the bush just to make my wordings to be more than 1000 words.

you guys should try to make room for amature STEM writers  so that people like me can fit in(**suggestion**). i dont like writing or even reading elongated  post.... 

**consider !!!**