Hi, it looks like other top curators are using quite diverse strategies.
@laonie usually have voting power around 50+%, on the other hand @mata have voting power around 90+%.
Your bot have 60+%, have you done some experiments with intensity of voting, or it just happens so ?
Voting power is one of those thing that the devs have explained very badly, so many people think that there's something bad about having low voting power. The reality is that voting power doesn't matter at all. I could drop my bot to voting at 75% on each vote, and my account's power would climb to around 100%, but I'd get exactly the same results after it equilibrates. I like my voting power to be a bit lower, because then I have a buffer if I have to shut the bot down for a while for some reason.
I mean, @mata's strategy seem to be to cast not many votes ( but mostly 100% weight) this keeping total voting power mostly over 95%. On the other hand there's @laonie making a lot of votes, often with only 30-60% weight, but because of many votes his total voting power is often just above 50%.
That seem to be very different strategies, but at the and both are successful.
Btw, did you got an email from me ?
Yeah, I did get an email from you. Sorry I never replied.
I see what you're asking. I haven't really tried to analyze @laonie or @mata, but they're both quite competitive. For a while a few weeks ago, it looked like @mata was the bot to beat, and of course @laonie was the champion for a long long time.
The "how often should you vote" question all comes down to a balancing act. On the inside of my bot is an adaptive model that predicts each post's payout; the correlation between actual payouts and predicted payouts is not great. Here's a scatterplot of the past week (horizontal is my prediction, vertical is actual):
They're obviously correlated (the correlation coefficient is around 0.65), but I can't predict with 100% accuracy how well a post is going to do. So to compensate for that error, I have to spread out my votes over more posts.
If my model were perfect, I'd vote for the best 40 or 50 posts each day and be done. Since my model isn't perfect, I vote for many more. I haven't done nearly as much validation as I'd like to see if I'm actually voting optimally given my model; I have a lot on my plate right now and I just don't have the time. When someone comes along and starts consistently beating me, I'll put some more work into improving the algorithm. :)