In what has become a yearly tradition, this is the third part of my series. Well, fourth, given there was a spin-off "Minding my Votes". The Mind Your Votes series has been a guide to maximising your curation rewards. However, I'll do Part III a bit differently, in more of a rambly format. This post will address the changes incoming with Hardfork 20 tomorrow. Please don't read the older Mind Your Votes posts as they are now outdated and inaccurate given current blockchain protocols.
While each new Mind Your Votes post addresses the changes in blockchain protocol, and how that affects curation and curation rewards, the basics remain the same.
Never, ever, vote on a Trending post.
This has been true from the very beginning, but even more so now. You see, since Mind Your Votes! II, a persistent plague has infested the Steem waters. Never vote on these posts, you're a) wasting voting power whilst getting minimal rewards, and b) effectively downvoting everyone else. Does that make you feel guilty? It should. You allocate rewards, do so responsibly.
A predictive game
Steem allocates curation rewards by predicting how early you are to a successful post. By voting on Trending posts, you are late to the party, and instead end up giving up curation rewards to those that voted before you.
The system incentivizes you to find undiscovered content which is sitting at $0. Even if you're the only one, you'll earn more curation rewards than on Trending posts. However, if the post becomes popular, you really do stand to make good money.
The curation rewards curve is quadratic - so early voters are heavily incentivized and get a larger share of the curation rewards generated by a post.
Power Up
Curation rewards are directly proportional to SP holdings. If you delegate SP away to someone else, those don't count towards your curation rewards. Similarly, you can increase your curation rewards by seeking SP delegations to your account.
Alright, so the basics of curation are simple, then. Find good, undiscovered content, don't vote on posts which already have a decent pending payout, and maximize your SP.
There's more to it, of course.
Mana
Voting power is gone, replaced by a Manabar. Yes, seriously, they are calling it Mana. Fortunately, it's much the same as voting power, with one change.
The easiest way to check your Vot...umm, Mana, is at https://steemd.com/@yourusername. As of now, it still shows a Voting Power bar, but I'm sure it'll be updated to Manabar after HF20.
The concept is the same - the more votes you make, the lower your Mana gets, and the less rewards you give out (and receive as curation rewards). Thus, managing Mana is an important part of curation. For HF20, many previous exploits have been patched over, so you are incentivized to keep your Mana as high as possible, without ever hitting 100%. Note that any time spent at 100% is pure waste.
Note: I'm assuming xxxx Mana is 100%. The nomenclature may differ, but it's the same thing.
Ah, so the change to Mana. In addition to your effective SP (i.e. your SP holding + delegations in - delegations out), Mana will also now deduct your weekly power down amount. So, if you're powering down at full rate, you stand to lose at least 1/13th of your influence. (Thanks @locikll for clarifying this) Note, however, that the weekly power down amount stays the same, despite your account balance. So, by your 10th week, basically much of your effective SP is gone, because your weekly power down amount is approaching your total balance. By the 12th week, you have essentially no influence left. You can counter this by canceling and starting a new power down, which will give a lower weekly power down amount. However, of course, that means your power downs will also be much slower. This is small incentive to keep powered up, but at the same time not too obtrusive.
Voting Strength
I had debated about skipping this bit, but I realized there might be new users this information will be useful for. Once your account hits ~500 Steem Power, you'll be able to select the strength of your vote. This is the best way to manage your Mana. At a 100% vote, it'll cost you 2% Mana, and it scales down linearly. Mana regenerates at 0.83% every hour, or 100% in 5 days. So, you can give out ten 100% votes per day, at even intervals, at near-100% Mana. Of course, since you're not a bot, you'd want to keep it closer to 80%-90% Mana.
Vote Shift
However, be careful not to vote too low %. With HF20, now each vote has 1.2 SP shifted out. So, if you have 500 SP in your account, and you make a 1% vote, your vote will only be worth 3.8 SP - not 5 SP as expected. Hence, you end up wasting 24% of your Mana. That is, at 100% Mana.
In a nutshell, voting has become a balance between keeping your voting strength % high, your Mana high, but at the same time giving out as many votes as possible.
Of course, if you have a high SP holding, this vote shift will not affect you.
The 15 Minute Window
For the first 15 minutes a post is up, your vote stands to surrender your curation rewards back to the general reward pool. If you vote at 0 seconds, you give up 100% of your rewards; 50% at 7.5 minutes; while retaining all of your curation rewards at 15 minutes.
So, you should just vote at 15 minutes, right? Not necessarily - remember, curation rewards is a predictive game. Someone might vote at 12 minutes instead, giving up 20% curation rewards. However, by being early, they may end up with twice as much rewards as at 15 minutes; so the 20% would be well worth the cost.
This is another reason to seek undiscovered content by unknown authors. There's less competition for votes, so you can comfortably vote at 14 minutes to 15 minutes.
Getting the word out
Once you have voted, you need other people to vote after you to increase your curation rewards. Please don't spam anyone though...
Use SteemLookup
Yeah, all of that is fine, but how do you find posts? Use SteemLookUp. Filter posts by the type you might like, so you don't have to crawl through a cesspit of shitposts.
Self-upvotes, unvotes and downvotes
Self-upvotes will get you the same curation rewards as any other upvote. If you vote in the first 15 minutes, you'll lose all of your curation rewards back to the reward pool. Unvoting will remove your curation rewards from the post. Downvoting comes with no curation rewards at all.
Don't vote in the last 12 hours
Starting at the 12 hours from post payout, payouts will decline linearly. One minute before the post pays out, your vote will be worth nothing. So, make sure you get your vote in within the first 6 days, 12 hours.
Bots
Die of boils.
The most altruistic thing a curator on Steem can do today is downvote all of those paid bot infested posts. You take rewards from them, and distribute it across the Steem reward pool It'll make you Steem's Robin Hood. It's not so altruistic, really, as it'll make Steem much better a social platform, and increase the value of your Stake long term.
To be fair, bots can be useful. One easy way, if you have a fast bot, is to get passive curation rewards is by following an account with a large trail, and getting in towards the front of it. Setting a bot to vote on popular authors isn't going to work though, as there'll be massive competition that'll be willing to give up more of the curation rewards well under the first 15 minutes the post is live.
Curation is a skill
Last time, I went on a rant about why curation is a skill. This time, all I'll tell you is that if everything seems overwhelming, it'll simply become second nature with some experience. You'll know instinctively what needs a vote, at what time, and at what voting strength.
Or just don't bother. Find a post you like, vote on it. Except anything Trending, don't vote those.
As im sure you know (and sorry for teaching grandad to suck eggs here, but i think it's useful to note for others reading), voting strength slider at 500sp is only a function of condenser (steemit.com). Proof of this is in that I gave this a 90% upvote with my piddly SP level using www.steempeak.com. I believe busy shows the slider for any SP value too.
I'd have given the post a 100% upvote if you'd mentioned this ;)
I had mentioned this in Part II, but opted to edit that out for this one to keep it simple and focus more on the changes. But yes, it's an important detail.
I believe I didn't mention this in Part I because the threshold to get that slider was 100,000 SP in 2016.
If this is done well, it should mean more of the rewards pool for everyone. If people handle it poorly, it means that a lot of people will be spamming the chain with 1% votes that literally do nothing, and do even more of nothing as they continue to cast them.
Will be interesting to see how this changes those "auto-voters" that I'm on.
Read it, and then voted on a post with 34 previous votes. Guess I'm going by: "Find a post you like, vote on it."^^
Remember, it's the pending payout that counts; not number of votes.
I'll just stick with this most of all. Really, it's 15 minutes now? It used to be 30, right?
I do use some automatic votes, because I'm spending less time on Steemit and still want to support certain people. Need to be sure to keep it updated though, so I don't reward the wrong people :-)
Yes, after tomorrow 15 UTC, when Hardfork 20 happens, it'll switch to 15 minutes.
lol! Love the strategy broken down, and thanks for explaining some of the HF20 changes. But I also think your closing words are on point. "Find a post you like, vote on it." Since I don't look at trending ever, pretty safe I won't be voting on those. ;) Now if I can just pace myself so that Mana stays high...
It should be easy enough once you get into the rhythm of things.
It should be easy
Enough once you get into
The rhythm of things.
- liberosist
I'm a bot. I detect haiku.
15mins nice, at least this should bring a little incentive back to sp sellers to vote on post they find worthy rather than the initial 30mins wait period.
Thanks for the above clearly detailed and I heard there will be a min sp users would be allowed to power down say 3sp or so
Congratulations! Your post has been selected as a daily Steemit truffle! It is listed on rank 2 of all contributions awarded today. You can find the TOP DAILY TRUFFLE PICKS HERE.
I upvoted your contribution because to my mind your post is at least 25 SBD worth and should receive 366 votes. It's now up to the lovely Steemit community to make this come true.
I am
TrufflePig, an Artificial Intelligence Bot that helps minnows and content curators using Machine Learning. If you are curious how I select content, you can find an explanation here!Have a nice day and sincerely yours,
TrufflePigI like your optimism.
I do too. Sadly, my posts have never reached the optimistic value projected. Perhaps yours will?
Thanks for the post. I am a terrible curator and don't see that changing, even with this informative guide.
This post was shared in the Curation Collective Discord community for curators, and upvoted and resteemed by the @c-squared community account after manual review.
Cutting through the confusion is helpful, and you do that here.
I note, however, that chasing rewards is contrary to actual engagement and the more useful rewards of social interactions, as you point out that simply focusing on monetary rewards completely ignores those more valuable benefits of society.
I'm not accusing you of anything, and note you later point out that folks should just engage with content they like.
I'm just trying to point out that society is far more valuable than it's economic aspects alone, and stake-weighting has similar effects on social media that it has IRL. I am confident you aren't ignorant of the benefits of society beyond mere finance, and have followed you for reasons that have nothing to do with money.
=) LOL
Thanks!
You are right, of course, but nevertheless, this series has been about maximising your curation rewards. I have written other posts about curation before, but I'm not going to any more. L0ook around you - a network where the home page is dominated by people buying votes will never be social. While there may be a fair few good people such as yourself who are here for the community, the reward pool is dominated by pure financial greed.
You're right about domination at present. It's the way of the world as well. Still, we wee folks that are here for other reasons persist somehow.
I'm on Reddit often. It's not like this. It's an actual social network where all the emphasis is on discussions, content and engagement. There are hundreds of millions of people on there, and there's lively discussion on even niche topics. Sure, there are trolls and bots, but there are moderators too that quickly deal with the menace. With premium, there are no ads either. So, in my world of social networks, Steem is an abysmal experience by comparison.
But yes, I know what you mean by "the way of the world".