What is DAP Curation?

DAP’s Curation Guidelines: everything writers need to know

Many of you will be familiar with Medium where, in fact, this article is published. It claims to have a 35 strong editorial curatation team that reviews thousands of stories every day. And it has more than 95 million unique readers visitors each month.

DAP decentralizes the curation function and isolates the related decision-making as a value proposition which is rewards directly and in an integrated way. Our curators are not “employees” like Medium.

The following editorial standards are a good baseline for DAP curators. But they can also rely on their own assessment of quality to determine whether or not to upvote an article.

Readers want stories that are insightful, considered, and well-written including:

• a strong narrative,
• pieces that convey useful and/or well-researched information, and
• articles with a nuanced point of view.

The writing should be polished and free of errors.

Here are some things curators should place value on:

• Headlines: Write a clear and descriptive title and subtitle for your story. Headlines should accurately reflect what your story is about — please avoid profanity, misleading “clickbait” phrasing, and using all-caps.
• Proofreading: Avoid major typos, errors, or formatting quirks in your story so readers can focus on the piece itself.
• Images: Ideally, you will include a featured image with your story. It appears when we preview your story for readers on our homepage or your profile. It should be an image that you have the rights to use. Pixabay images work with DAP.

Curators should flag articles with the following:

• Ads and content marketing: No advertising for third-party products, services, or brands including stories whose predominant purpose is gaining attention for a brand.
• Images containing advertising or sponsorship
• Copyright violations: You must have the rights or permission to use all the words and images in your story. (If not, there must be a strong case that you are using it lawfully under fair use rules.) This includes all copyrighted writing, as well as professional photography from services such as Getty Images, Associated Press, or Reuters. If you have permission or a license to use copyrighted material, state it in the story body. Otherwise curators will flag your article.
• Advocate or promote intolerance or prejudice against individuals or groups, including the use of scientific or pseudoscientific claims to pathologize, dehumanize, or disempower others.
• Glorify, celebrate, downplay, or trivialize violence, suffering, abuse, or deaths.
• Exist mainly to target, shame, intimidate, or harass identified, identifiable, or anonymous people.
• Dox someone, including by exposing personal information or aggregating of public information.
• Consist of unsubstantiated, unverified, or misleading claims and reporting.
• Serialization: Stories that are split into multiple posts are unlikely to be curated unless each post works on its own without additional context.

The guidelines above can be considered a bare minimum — curators are looking for stories that surpass this minimum. Your story might not be curated even if it has not been disqualified by any of these criteria. Reasons for this include curators’ individual quality judgment and a writer’s past curation acceptance. Quality is inherently subjective.

The statements, views, and opinions contained in curated stories are those of the authors and are not endorsed by, nor do they necessarily reflect the opinions of DAP’s decentralized curators.