Writing
Curation is confusing and annoying
But I think I’ve figured it out
As I write this, I’ve been here ten weeks and have had 21 stories curated. As some were curated more than once, we could say it’s a little more than that, but I won’t. At first glance, that seems pretty good: it’s better than two a week. But when you realize that I’ve submitted 144 stories in that period, the percentage is low.
I was confused and annoyed at first. I was happy that some stories were curated, but annoyed that others every bit as good were rejected. It seemed all very arbitrary.
Then a story I did not like at all was picked. I disliked the story because although it had a point I wanted to make, I could not quite get the flow and tone right. The story did not read as well as I wanted, but, after futzing with it for a week, I gave up and let it go. I cannot quite think of the right word for my reaction when I was notified that it had been curated. Bemused comes close.
A week later, the same thing happened: a story I was less than crazy about was picked, yet several others that I think are very good were ignored. How can this be explained?
It’s probably simple
First, given the number of new stories written every day, there must be more than a few editors here making curation decisions. After the computer algorithm looks a story over and decides that it is good enough for a human to read, one or more editors gets a chance to look at it. Maybe the algorithm even decides which editors should see it.
Now imagine that you are that editor. You have a large pile of stories to look through and the subject areas you are responsible for get many submissions. You are going to be fussy. It’s not going to take much for you to reject a story when you have hundreds or maybe thousands of similar pieces to look at.
On the other hand, let’s say that one of the subject areas you are responsible for is slim pickings today. Nobody has submitted anything new that will fit the slot. But, hey, here’s something that could work. It’s not great, but it’s the right subject and there are no glaring grammatical errors. Click, yeah, accepted, move on.
I think that would explain everyone’s confusion and frustration concerning curation.
What about the money? So far, 10 weeks in, I’m averaging $4.20 a week, so, if it keeps increasing at the same rate, I’m looking forward to making a good income in 8–10 years.
