Curation details you might not be aware of!

in #curation6 years ago (edited)

I know what you may be thinking - "curation"? What's that? Although probably half of the existing Steem Power resides in bid bots now there are still users trying to make the most out of curation and might actually enjoy doing it. Sure they are playing a losing battle, especially with SBD being valued so much thus the returns of delegating to bid bots are much higher. Hence maybe a refresher for curation might be a good time. You might learn a few small details you didn't know existed, especially if you are new to the platform.

Curve

Since voting moved to a linear curve - meaning that each of your vote always gives out the same value depending on your current voting power and Steem Power, curation rewards are still on the quadratic curve.
This means that if you are first to vote on a post that has a low payout which later happens to receive a lot of bid bot votes, you will be rewarded a lot more steempower than the minimum of your voting power.
As an example, I would usually receive between 4-5 SP per 100% vote on a post if no one else were to vote on it after, but on this one post which I voted at almost 0 rewards and went up to ~500$ I have these upcoming curation rewards:

Source: steemworld.org

There are quite some people trying to better their curation results, @abh12345 has a weekly curation league where he shows statistics of the best curators if you are interested in following them.

Penalty

There is currently a penalty in place that was originally created to counter curation bots that would just vote on posts as soon as they were posted to get most of the curation rewards from it.
Basically if you vote on a post that was just posted (at 0 minutes) 100% of your potential curation rewards will automatically go to the author. I am quite surprised how so many users are still not aware of this.
The penalty diminishes gradually up to 30 minutes when 100% of the potential curation rewards go to you, at 15 minutes its 50%.
A post is divided in 75% going to the author with 50% being SBD and 50% Steem Power and 25% going to curators as Steem Power. This means that if you happen to find a post at 30 minutes and resteem or share it with your whale friends after you've cast your vote, your curation rewards have the chance to maximize. Some times though, especially on popular authors it can be more tactical to curate earlier, sacrificing curation rewards but still receiving more steem power if a few large votes are to land on the post before the 30 minute mark.
Autovotes used to sport this, people checked at what minute mark other users were autovoting on and front-running eachother to receive higher rewards.

Voting Power

As most of you know by now, you have 10x 100% votes per 24 hours. This means that when you are at 100% VP your 1 vote will burn exactly 2% voting power bringing you down to 98%. To be the most efficient with your voting combined that you'd vote on good posts that would get you good curation rewards, it would make sense to always vote when you are at 100% voting power. This way you use the most rshares at your disposal and may get the highest returns possible. Rshares are units of your voting power that influences the rewardpool decision on how to distribute the newly created Steem and SBD, they can be found on steemd.com if you click the "advanced mode" when viewing a post.

Voting power burning is flexible though. If you decided to vote 50x in one day and expect your voting power to reach 0% because each max vote burns 2% of your VP than you have another thing coming. The burning efficiency decreases depending on your current voting power, say you are at 50% voting power, your 100% vote will only burn 1% power and at the same time give rshares worth the same as if you had cast a 50% vote at 100% voting power. The lower you go the more votes you can cast, but in the end it results in pretty much the same outcome. The disadvantage here is if you know that a post is going to make a lot of rewards then you not being at 100% voting power to cast a 100% vote will mean you will receive less curation rewards from it.

In case you were to make a post and want to reward yourself the most then you'd have to vote yourself as early as possible since most of that voting power will go straight to your author rewards and make sure that you are at 100% voting power. This is about to change though in the next hardfork where the penalty ends at 15 minutes instead of 30 and votes cast before that go back to the reward pool instead of going to the author.

If you see curators giving you 100% votes, it may not always mean that they are at 100% voting power, you can use sites like steemnow.com or steemworld.com to easy check the voting power of their 100% votes. If I had a Steem for every time someone in the beginning used to ask me "hey, I voted 100% on you, why did you only vote me back 20%?". Not to mention the difference in Steem Power we had to effectively vote trade but you found out that user was also at 5% voting power cause he went around doing the same on everyone thinking voting power grows on trees.

Another detail/bug I believe very few users know about is that at a certain percentage under 2. It was discussed some time ago but was not for certain exactly at what (1.50%-2%) your votes burn the same amount as if you voted wit a 2% no matter what. I.E. if you vote with 0.5% it might not burn the equivalent in voting power and you might just be wasting the remaining up to 1.5% voting power by not voting with a 2% minimum instead. I see a lot of accounts and even curation projects doing it because it is quite hard to notice any difference.


Some great tools you may want to use for a more efficient and easier to check curation on your posts and others I would recommend steemworld.org. Recently they also added a "coming curation rewards" which shows all of the curation rewards you have incoming for the week, this can help to make your rewards more efficient by trial and error. Steemdb.com/@username/curation is also a great site that shows you your history of curation rewards with a daily percentage which can motivate you on how to improve daily. It's a percentage game and if you get good at it it can mean that the next day you have a chance at earning even more due to previous rewards while fighting against a decreasing inflation.

If you have any questions about curation or things you are confused about in the post, feel free to ask them here in the comments. I am not the most technical person about how everything works on the blockchain exactly but I like to think I know the rules of it quite well. :)


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nimet_n

Looks like your post launched the Steem price as well!

Hehe, I should do regular posts more often. ^^

I get really excited whenever I get a notification from ginabot that you've made a new post and I actually check it out and it isn't a gaming post lol. I actually learn a lot from most of your writings and this isn't an exception.

My SP is worth close to nothing at the moment and earning curation rewards was a bit of mystery for me just over 3 weeks ago. I read a lot of things about how curation rewards work in my early weeks on steemit but I couldn't fully grab it. @themarkymark made one of such interesting posts and even though it confused me a lot I followed his advice of curating on a post between the 25th and 30th minute of the post's lifespan.
On a very few occasions, I'd receive 0.001 or 0.002 sp as curation reward until I recently started using steemauto to upvote on some minnows posts with potential good enough return but with few curators.

My curation rewards earnings have slightly increased to around 0.015 at times to 0.004 at least recently and it's kinda cool.

What I am yet to fully grasp is this, since my sp is still lower than 500 I don't have the voting slider and reducing my percentage of the vote to lower than 100% with steemauto would mean my upvote is close to worthless, do I still earn rewards at 100% upvote but with 60% voting power?

do I still earn rewards at 100% upvote but with 60% voting power?

Yes, if you are at 60% voting power and vote 100% it's as if you had voted 60% at 100% voting power. It's all in the rshares. Considering you're SP is low and you want to make sure to reach 0.001 SP curation rewards minimum on each vote I'd suggest to let your voting power be as high as possible.

I appreciate your kind gestures and especially these tips you've given out today. I have met steemians who would charge sbd or steem to teach minnows stuff like this.

My voting power limit is currently set at 75%. This way i would still have enough vp to manually curate on good contents i find on the feeds page without expecting curation rewards. Might seem small but little drops of rain do fill a cup of water.

I have met steemians who would charge sbd or steem to teach minnows stuff like this.

@jerrybanfield? :D

Hahaha, I can't name names lol. I'm still learning how to swim in this big steem ocean.

Unbelievable, then curators who vote at 0.02% are burning their vote at 2%
If so, it is a great loss.

Hey @acidyo, mind if I ask? I know this is somewhat not related to the topic, but how about the division of author rewards? Say for example, a post has gotten $100 in upvotes right after the 0 min mark, and then gets $50 more after the 30 min mark. Does that mean that the total $150 will be divided to 75% to the author and 25% to the curators, or the whole $100 is given to the author and the $50 is the only one to be split between the author and curator rewards? Thanks.

the whole $100 is given to the author and the $50 is the only one to be split between the author and curator rewards

Yes this one due to the penalty. Most posts give out less than 20% curation rewards, its quite uncommon to see any at exactly 25%, it would mean most votes would have had to appear after the 30 minute mark like the one in the screenshot on my post.

Little by little, I understand how things work here. Thanks for your help!

Whoa!
That's a lot I didn't know
It still doesn't matter much at my voting power though but it's good to know how I can increase my curation rewards

Come on man , I have missed on so much.
I didn't know anything about that. No one discussed the penalty issue before.
That's something important I have missed on this platform.
Thanks for this information though. Will help a lot.
Cheers mate.
How's your gaming going on, CSGO and league of legends?

Taking a break lately with Destiny 2, enjoying it quite a bit. :)

Yeah sure. I haven't been able to watch your live stream lately. But I will get back to you after sometime.
Tell me brother how the heck do you get this much upvote in such a little time.
Seems a mystery for me.

It was from your 1% upvote! :)

Fuck yeah. You sure can be sarcastic man.
But this comment made my day. Hahahaha.
Not that my upvote will matter much but I will give you a 100% upvote.

lol it's fine, I just happened to notice it on steemnow.com :D

As a red fish it is hard to score some curation rewards. The best thing one can hope for is that the author uses bid bots on his posts after you managed to upvote the post. Steembottracker has a great functionality build in, called front running the bots. There you can see who is using bid bots to upvote their posts. Giving you some time to upvote it before the bots do.
Are you really getting 17SP as curation? Or did I misunderstood it? Impressive because it is more than my average weekly author rewards 😁
Cheers,
Peter

Yeah 17 for that one post, depending on how exact his tool is that measures it. Could be one of my top 3 curation rewards.

That's just impressive. My records stands on 0.054SP, which actually isn't quit so bad with only 500 SP. Good luck with the blocktrades contest, you are doing an amazing job with that one!
Hope that I will eligible to participate, because I did edit my post and changed the X into a T before I knew that I need to wait for a mention of the bot. :(

Let anomadsoul know about it, I'm sure he can let that one edit slide.

Thanks. Should I contact him via discord or just by replying on one of his posts?

Whatever gets his attention. :P

582 votes after 5 minutes..... LOL

Cheers for the mention dude!

Just wait til I start focusing on curation rewards in the near future again, I'm gonna be topping that league constantly! ;)

If you had an alt that your main account trailed then maybe :P But I wouldn't bet any STEEM on it ;)

That's what you call serious followers! lol

Who's voted for @acidyo today?

Pff, its only 0.0008% of all existing accounts!

2% of all Posting accounts today - 3% now :D

The important part is that all combined is quite a small vesting percentage. :P

I see lots of articles here on bidbots: some in support, some against, and some neutral on them. I think that when users sign up for Steemit they take the home page marketing at face value: provide high quality or upvote high quality and get rewards. However, the complexity of the relationship between votes and rewards is not that simple. In fact, it is so complex and depends on so many dynamic factors the its likely that one can only optimize ROI (or even come close) by automating voting: hence bidbots. While there are certainly good arguments for doing this and some bidbots still vote in alignment with content quality, it seems all to easy to design them to maximize ROI regardless of quality.

Most bid bots don't give a positive ROI as far as I'm aware. They are an advertising tool and it costs to use them to get to Hot/Trending.

I'm referring to the ones that claim to (at least sometimes) give a return. The ones with a whitelist of high quality steemers seem to be a good way to encourage quality if you have enough SP to make a difference.

30 minutes are just over and I see 905 votes there already. Seems I came here just a second to late :)

If you don't use some curation tools, or delegate your steem power it is really hard to do some effective voting. And maybe it doesn't really matter as long as you don't have a lot of SP anyways.

So I just keep on voting by hand, and actually read most of the posts too. Pretty old-school huh?

However, quite informative post and thanks for the head ups. Yes I have read it all.

Btw... thank you for giving my friend some welcoming vote on their introduction post. Appreciated!

Wow , I didn’t even know about the penalty issue that occurs and I’ve seen it happen often on this paltform . Everyone wants to maximize the return to themselves , but is that considered selfish ?

Everyone wants to maximize the return to themselves , but is that considered selfish ?

At a time like these, just curating other users may be considered as one of the least selfish things you can do.

This should be a giving community as well, it’s decreased in my opinion