I think the Steemit developers and the community their system creates is the unfortunate problem here- much as I appreciate what Curie is doing, as you've said, it's unreasonable to assume that Curie will upvote more than one of your posts, especially on a regular basis, even though I've gotten quite lucky with Curie itself. And since Curie don't share their decision making process, it's difficult for an outsider to 'cater' their content to Curie's tastes in order to earn a sustainable income (which is likely why that decision making process isn't shared)
The big issue for me is that I don't get a lot of people engaging with my work after a Curie upvote, I might have a post that's at the top of the trending page but there's very little indication that any of the users who regularly read content from that tag, or even the curators themselves, actually read the content. I see the money as a bonus to the idea of Curie being a way to promote undervalued authors, so that those authors can earn followers who will actually regularly read their work. Of my 92 followers I'd say less than 10 of them are actually regular readers. And while I can try reaching out myself, Steemit's upvote bots make it very difficult to find worthwhile content that I can comment on which is relevant to the most used tags I attach to my content, both because of how much crap reaches the top and how much of that crap there is.
New users who join Steemit because I got excited about my upvote mostly do so just to support me, their friend or family member, and then because they don't much care for Steemit they may forget they signed up because of the long sign up process, or they'll lose their password because they're not used to platforms that don't have password recovery functions. That's on them of course, but it still puts people off despite how absurd that seems to an experienced user.
And if readers don't provide feedback, then there's no way of telling what kind of content you should be posting to promote regular engagement with your work. I simply don't feel we have enough actually good content creators or commenters on this platform yet, and even intelligent people might look at Steemit and think of it as a ponzi scheme or a whale farm.
I think these are all issues that the Steemit developers themselves have to solve. We can't tell a community to not abuse a system that is so readily ripe for abuse. Where there's a hole, water will flow through it.
Curie desperately needs to succeed in its mission statement to get the wider Steemit audience to notice- to me, I think Curie needs a way to make it abundantly obvious that their upvote is different from a whale or bot upvote. When I received my first curie vote, I assumed a whale or a malicious cartel had upvoted me. It wasn't until I enquired further that I learned more. When looking at a Curie upvoted post on the trending page, there's also no way to distinguish between a Curie vote and a whale vote, so people might instinctively avoid a Curie upvoted post on principle, assuming the post is garbage.
Just some thoughts.
Thanks for the well thought out comment! First, let me start at the end :) I 100% agree that Curie could and should do a better job of the most basic part of explaining its mission - making it transparent what, in fact, just happened when a post gets the big upvote! The Curie voting stakeholders have already voted to make an automated comment, very short and sweet, without shilling or selling anything, to explain that the post was found through human curation and upvoted after human review as exceptional content (and referring to the Discord channel and our whitepaper to learn more). So, that is in the works.
The lack of engagement and feedback that you are mentioning in the first portions are definite problems with Steem - and this is the problem that all of the communities which I mentioned in my post have sprung up to solve. You pretty much have to engage in an off-blockchain community (usually based on Discord but I guess some people must still use steem.chat LOL) to actually generate real interaction on your posting. Unless you have a large sum of money to invest in which case people will be more than happy to be your friend ;) So, in my post above, I did not mean to imply that the communities here do not have value. They do. My advice to you if you want to stick it out here and actually generate real interaction on your posting, is you are going to have to find and join one of the many communities here. That could be one of the writing communities (writers block / isle of write), MSP, or whatever. It takes a time commitment and a willingness to hang out in a chat server. If you make that commitment, a Discord community will absolutely read your posting and offer you feedback and fill in these cracks that are actually gaping crevasses if you only stay on the blockchain proper.
I'm glad to hear Curie is working to actively improve their system. I shouldn't really be surprised, but it's a good thing to hear from one of their key members regardless!
I must admit, despite being a frequent discord user, I feel pretty overwhelmed when stepping into one of the larger servers. I think you're definitely right, though, that right now joining a separate community is the best way to go about things. I'd be interested in taking a look at Curie's server sometime.