The Art (and Chaos) of Curation
How we learned the messy magic of community curation—eight years of trial, error, and confetti.
We’re 24 hours out from curating Season 5.
The stakes are high. Hundreds of submissions—some of the best we’ve ever seen. And now we’re faced with the impossibly hard task of deciding which ones to curate.
Last season, 1.4 million votes were cast. This season, we’ll likely break 2 million.
So I want to take a moment to explain how curation works at Artizen—why we’ve built it the way we have, and what we’ve learned after eight years of experimentation, failure, and hard-won insight. It’s a system that’s weird, messy, and beautiful.
But one that only works if you show up.
So please go vote now.
We’ve been experimenting with community curation since 2017. And let me tell you: it’s one of the hardest design problems I’ve ever worked on.
How do you lift the best projects to the top—without it becoming a popularity contest?
How do you give everyone a voice—without letting the loudest voices drown out the rest?
How do you keep it fair when creators are competing for limited slots?
How do you make voting fun?
And most important of all—how do you build a system where even the losers walk away feeling good?
We’ve tried a lot of things. Many backfired. We’ve pissed people off. Learned the hard way. We’ve smashed headfirst into more walls than I can count. But each failure taught us something.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
Everyone should have a voice. But not all voices should be equally loud.
We want anyone to vote. That’s why we give new users up to 100 points just for filling out their profile. Low barrier. Easy entry.
But we also want to reward people who contribute real value. Sponsors. Buyers. Funders. If you put $1 into the ecosystem, you get 10 votes. That’s how we amplify meaningful participation.
Still—we don’t want Artizen to be pay-to-play. So we do something unusual. At the end of every season, we airdrop voting points to creators based on how much they raised. Raise $1,000? Get 10,000 votes. That way, the most successful creators on the platform get a seat at the table next season—with a loud voice to match.
You can also earn votes by showing up. Come to events. Complete quests. Do good stuff. And you’ll be rewarded.
Even whales have to work for it.
Voting power is uneven. That’s by design. But we don't want rich users—or successful creators—to dominate just by holding a giant vote stash.
So we made one simple rule: every vote has to be clicked manually.
Whether you have 100 votes or 1 million, you have to press the button. Again. And again. And again.
Because time is the great equalizer. If you care about a project, you’ll spend your time voting for it. That’s the signal we’re looking for—not just money or clout.
Of course, clicking a button 10,000 times sounds miserable. So we made it fun.
We engineered the vote button to be butter-smooth and lightning fast. Every click explodes with confetti. The leaderboard updates in real-time. It’s dopamine on tap.
We turned it into a game.
We launched a Pro account so power users can vote 10x faster. And we’re adding more mechanics: daily streaks, vote bonuses, surprise quests.
Voting becomes play. And play makes everything better.
Breakthroughs happen at the edges.
For years, we treated all submissions equally. Top 30% got curated—regardless of topic. But big, trendy communities dominated.
Weird, brilliant outliers got ignored.
The best ideas often look like bad ideas. They’re niche. Scary. Strange. But that’s where real breakthroughs live. So we changed the system.
Now, curation happens within each Fund. Projects don’t compete against the whole platform. They compete against others in the same creative pocket.
That’s how you surface wild ideas from the edges—while still celebrating work from more established fields. This shift has brought much more diversity into our curated lineup. And it’s made the process feel a lot more fair.
Curation at Artizen isn’t perfect. It never will be.
But it’s better than anything we’ve seen. And we’ll keep making it better.
Because creativity deserves better than gatekeepers. It deserves community. It deserves play. So if you're reading this, go vote.
Your voice matters. And this whole thing only works if you use it.
Love,
René Pinnell
Founder of Artizen
Very much important