I have been a supporter of the @OCD curation project since it caught my attention well over a year ago and I am looking forward to them coming back from there manual curation hiatus on the 29th of October. A couple days ago the founder, @acidyo announced @ocdb, a paid bot that is only available to those on the whitelist. You can see the announcement [here](https://steemit.com/ocdb/@acidyo/ocdb-announcement) and also offer people considered for whitelisting [here](https://steemit.com/ocd/@acidyo/ocdb-whitelist-recommendations). 

https://steemitimages.com/0x0/https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmV2yEENtdGAnncn6abapsxUkzv32j2Lgc7CYzYRiLtBGb

@ocd has done a very good job with very little support and has been largely funded privately and through donations of delegation. It has over 30 manual curators across several languages and gets to about 20 posts a day plus, a couple of resteems. The value added isn't extremely high but, it *is* significant and has managed to help with retention and engagement. 

Essentially though,  @ocdb it is a non-profit, fixed rate, low-level paid bot that currently returns 150% - curation on the max bid of 2.5 SBD. That means that it will return about 1.25 SBD - curation per bid and unless the market swings massively in a week, will always provide a positive return. THese numbers might change over time depending on utilization and although it doesn't sound like much considering other bot's massive votes, there are 2700 people currently on a whitelist that will continually grow as the @ocd manual curators continue their work uncovering contributors who offer some quality. You can check if you are on the [whitelist here](https://thegoodwhales.io/index.html).

I am a delegator to this bot and have been all through the testing phase, even though it has been severely under utilized. The reason is that unlike the general bidbots, @ocdb is tied exclusively to a content creation community with the aim to also continually support the community manually. 

Although I have zero say over the functioning of @ocd (I am just an observer), I do know that they are always trying to do their best by the community. They encourage frontrunning their posts by voting late, they spend hundreds of collective hours searching for users, they have their discord group and active curators who all are invested in the future of Steem. With the coming Hivemind fork on the way, there has never been a better time to develop a community. But, they can only support so much so often.

For those who choose to use it, @ocdb adds a way for them to earn an extra Steem or two on their post and if they are wise (in my opinion), will use that to power up and build some stake. The bot can be utilized once a day which means depending on prices can take an account from zero to near minnow-hood in a year alone. That is very significant if a few hundred (or potentially thousand) people take advantage of it. The bot itself makes no return as all proceeds including curation, is delivered back to delegators. It is severely underutilized though so the delegators that are there aren't doing it for the return alone.

These kinds of community distributors are going to be more and more common as time goes on as with more people coming in, the chances of being discovered will go down, *especially* if people are not powering up among the low levels. This is the hope though, that those who are benefiting from the @ocdb return are using it to become future community supporters that can provide manual support across the platform as well as support their on financial futures here. 

Although not an ideal solution, this bot is some kind of middle ground that still has some ties to content quality without being too demanding. Also, its stake can't be abused to push a post into Trending as it is a low level distributor that aims to spreading widely to many among the community and, they have proven that they can create something worthy at least once. Of course, the @ocd curators are going to be keeping an eye on the posts that are supported by the bot and abuse will be dealt with as you can read in the announcement linked above.

I have mentioned the low numbers of accounts with stake several times before but a community that could potentially be made up of hundreds of redfish and minnows who all have decent stake and are content creators, has the chance to be very influential on the platform if united. With the Hivemind aspects coming and the RC pools of delegation being developed, being part of a strong community is going to be a very big benefit for individuals as well as a resource for onboarding and supporting new users. Collectively, they can do a lot but that takes collective stake.

I am pretty sure as time goes on, the @ocd team will add more options to the way the bot works and tweak numbers as necessary to offer decent returns. Some people may complain that the return isn't significant enough to be worth it and perhaps for them it isn't but, getting near 50% gain on anything is rare and this offers it daily for those who have proven themselves at some point. 

Now, remembering that the @ocd curators will be checking general levels of quality, they may likely occasionally do things like include some of those posts in their compilations or, give a little bump extra with free voting power if they have it. Perhaps, just take note of the names to watch for the future. This should hopefully be an incentive for users to develop decent content more often and if they care about the future of the platform and other contributors use it to power up. Again, I don't have anything to do with @ocd directly but I am pretty sure they are trying to find ways to have a strong future here so I am writing this as some kind of support as our goals are aligned. 

As I see it, what will bring stability and opportunity to Steem is distribution of resources that get powered up into active accounts. With the future potential to earn from Resource Credits in the future, this should offer added incentive to do so. This in turn will lock more Steem into more accounts and drive prices of Steem upward which makes the value of powered up Steem much more valuable and more able to distribute to new users, who will come because the capabilities of a very diverse range of staked users with the ability to reward them across many niche content areas. 

Most people use the bots to earn, I hope this one will be used to create a stronger community. 

@ocd have [opened their discord](https://discord.gg/k2Hu77b) so if you have questions about their curation activities, @ocdb or the whitelist, please drop in their and talk to them as they are most welcoming. You might even meet some familiar faces.

Let's see how it goes over time. 

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]