In a previous post, I talked about the [QuratorToken][qtokens] which we can use to earn STEEM, but hadn't explained about the Qurator project itself. I've been a Qurator community member (or a "Qurite," as they call their members) since the end of March of 2018, and like it a lot. I've actually talked about the project in various past posts, but many things have changed since then, and made my past posts obsolete. So, here's a new one!

### What is Qurator?

<center>![One of the Qurator project's banners] (https://steemitimages.com/DQmSSjgs1swFwv64uXRVpB9DAtzSnDv2Eeqr3CnPAup4WVV/Banner.png)<br />
**Image source: one of the Qurator project's promotional banners, found [here](https://steemit.com/qurator/@qurator/qurator-3-0-update-post-guidelines-or-registration-details-or-tier-changes)**</center>

@qurator is a community project to help give exposure to authors of original and quality content. They promote members' posts by:

* Giving one upvote a day to each member: upvotes give more visibility to a post because the post goes up the list on the pages of the tags it has been published under. Not only this, but upvotes increase the post's payout, of course! And give a moral boost to the author, too.
* Featuring members' articles in their "Daily Qurator" curation posts.
* Holding contests (with bigger upvotes as prizes) where participants leave a link to their posts so that other users can see them. The current contests are:
  * Tasty Tuesday: where participants submit a link to their food-related posts (no need to be a member to participate). Held every Tuesday.
  * Photo Friday: where participants submit posts about the photos they took (no need to be a member to participate). Held every Friday.
  * Toss up Thursday: where participants submit a link to posts about everything else (only members may participate). Held every Thursday.

There is also a [Discord channel][q_discord] for members to engage and also to promote their posts.

### How to become a member?

In the past, there was a one-time fee to become a member. However, Qurator has recently [announced that joining has become completely free][qregupdate]! This is great news, especially to small users who can't afford paying to join.

If you still aren't a member and would like to join, first of all, your account must be older than two weeks or have at least ten posts, and you need to follow some rules (to me, though, they feel more like good practice guidelines). In short, your posts must:

* Not be just a picture (in this case one picture isn't worth a thousand words :P ). Make sure most of your posts have more than 150 words.
* Cite the sources of images even if they are in the public domain (because readers may not know that). Citing Google Images as the source is also wrong (you have to indicate the link of the actual website the image came from, and not the Google search. Qurator has a [post detailing how to cite image sources correctly][imgsourcing]).
* Not badmouth other steemians and not incite flag wars.
* And obviously, no plagiarism or spam etc..

There are also some tags that Qurator doesn't upvote, mainly because they come from apps that generate very short content. At the moment of this writing, they are: dlike, dmania, drugwars-fight, parley, steemhunt, zappl.

Qurator will upvote posts with the following tags, but only if the posts have at least 250 words: actifit, appics, musing, share2steem.

View more details on the rules [here][qregupdate].

If your posts meet the requirements, you may apply to become a member. There are two ways to apply:

* Way 1: if you use Discord, you may leave your username in the Account Review room of [Qurator's Discord server][q_discord].
* Way 2: alternatively, you may send your username in the memo of a wallet message to @qurator from Steemit itself (or Busy or Steempeak or whatever STEEM frontend you use).

In either case, their team of moderators will manually review your account, then tell you whether you were approved or not (through either Discord or a wallet message, depending on the method you used).

### I became a member. Now what?

Members get access to the daily upvotes, contests and more. Newly registered members get a bonus and receive daily upvotes cast with 1,000 SP for one month.

After that, members can do a few things to continue getting upvotes and increase the upvotes' values:

#### Upvote Qurator's posts

By upvoting @qurator's daily posts, members will be upvoted at "the sum of the votes they gave that week times 1.4" on the following week. For example, if my upvote is worth 0.002, If I upvote 7 Qurator posts in a week, the sum of the votes I gave them for that week will be 0.014. This means that the following week, Qurator will give me daily upvotes worth "0.14 X 1.4 = 0.0196."

#### Delegate SP

Of course, delegations make Qurator have more SP to be able to upvote more people! And there is also an incentive to get bigger upvotes by delegating SP. Who delegates SP to @qurator gets upvotes worth 9 times the amount of SP delegated. For example, delegating 100 SP would get daily upvotes cast using 900 SP. In addition to the upvotes, delegating SP also gets QuratorTokens, which you can read about below or in [this other post][qtokens].

#### Pay for monthly subscriptions

For bigger upvotes, there is also a monthly subscription. Before, there were 5 levels (from SUB1 to SUB5), but after the STEEM platform changes that came with HardFork 21, Qurator [changed the subscriptions][qchanges21] and there is now only one level:

* Send 2 STEEM to get daily 5,000 SP upvotes for a month.

To pay for the monthly subscription, send 2 STEEM to @qurator with "sub" and the name of the month in uppercase in the memo. For example, for August, the memo would be:

    sub AUGUST

#### Or combine any of the options above

One cool thing is that all the above options stack! This means that to get bigger upvotes, we can upvote and delegate, or upvote and pay for a monthly subscription, or delegate and pay for a monthly subscription, or even do all the three at the same time!

As an example, if I'm getting 0.0196 daily upvotes by voting on 7 Qurator posts a week, if I were to also delegate 100 SP and receive 900 SP upvotes (for the calculation in this example, let's suppose 900 SP upvotes were worth 0.008), the daily upvotes that I would get would be "0.0196 + 0.008," that would mean 0.0276. And on top of that, if I were to pay the 2 STEEM monthly subscription (let's suppose that a 5,000 SP upvote is worth 0.045), it would be "0.0276 + 0.045,"
resulting in around 0.0726 daily upvotes.

Note: lots of suppositions in this example... because STEEM and SBD prices are changing too much, and also, after HardFork 21 the upvote values are no longer fixed (it depends on how much reward the post has already received). I listed values just for reference, so that readers get an idea of how the stacked upvote options work.

### Qustodian bot

There was also a paid upvote bot called Qustodian, that was for Qurator members only. But after the changes that came with HardFork 21, it was discontinued. :(

### QuratorTokens

And there is also their token, the QuratorToken (Q) which I had talked about in a [previous post][qtokens]. We get daily STEEM payouts (at least 0.001 STEEM per Q) just by holding the token (no need to stake). The first round of 10,000 Q has already been distributed, and until another round comes, the only ways to get Q will be to buy them from someone at the [Steem Engine market][qmarket] (for a higher price than normal), or delegate SP to @qurator (100 SP delegated gets 0.02 Q per day, and as mentioned before, delegating SP is also a way to get bigger upvotes if you are a member). Qurator has said that Q tokens may be used to get bigger upvotes or pay for the monthly subscriptions in the future, too.

Edit (September 2019): on September 19th, 2019, [the second round of QuratorTokens started][qround2], with 10,000 more issued tokens, from which 3,000 were put for sale on the Steem Engine market.

### Witness

Last but not least, @qurator is also a witness, with focus on supporting their members and also other community initiatives that help original content creators. You can also vote for them if you like what they do!

[qtokens]: https://steemit.com/qurator/@aiyumi/quratortoken-a-new-token-to-get-a-hold-of
[q_discord]: https://discord.gg/nhQehdv
[qregupdate]: https://steemit.com/qurator/@qurator/qurator-registration-update-or-now-free-to-join
[imgsourcing]: https://steemit.com/qurator/@qurator/standard-image-sourcing-for-the-qurator-project
[qmarket]: https://steem-engine.com/?p=market&t=Q
[qchanges21]: https://steemit.com/qurator/@qurator/qurator-quality-of-life-updates-after-the-hf-or-subs-or-upvotes-or-token-or-news
[qround2]: https://steemit.com/qurator/@qurator/qurator-tokens-round-2-or-10-000-tokens