So it goes like .08% and 30% over a year.
The reward pool is a fixed amount and competition will likely drive those rates down. There are only two possibilities here. One is that your voting skill is not exceptional, meaning that others will successfully compete with you and drive your returns down. The second is that your voting skill is exceptional (even if by accident) then you are being rewarded for your exceptional skill, but your experience is not typical. Even then people will still probably study what you do and eventually learn to compete successfully with you, driving your returns down.
To the extent that talent to compete with you does not exist within the system, it means increased demand to buy in and compete with you.
I think no particular talent is needed for "covering the board" (taken from the roulette idea of filling the table with chips - but the rewarding structure here is different so my 80 cents of daily upvote value end up getting far more): https://steemit.com/curation/@alexgr/curation-strategy-covering-the-board
Try it for a day or something... use one of your regular votes, split it in 100 parts of 1%, and just upvote anything that seems upvote worthy with anything <1$ worth of upvotes before you click it (preferably <0.1$). This should work better for whales than me, because they are followed by bots.
Now, by the very fact that other whales have to vote something, you'll end up front-running them. This 1 vote split by 100 might actually give you more in curation rewards than several of your full votes. You can try variations as well, like 2-3 regular votes instead of 1 - for 200-300 votes. Or more % per vote... You can be creative if you want to try this out.
Sure but if it works, it is easily copied. If only the first to do it makes money then competition will drive these votes to 1 second (really 3 seconds) where they make nothing.
You perhaps found a profitable strategy which is great. That doesn't make it sustainable or scaleable to more participants.
Also, there is supposed to be a natural rate of return for even stupid voting (so not voting at all is slightly punished as non-participation). That is somewhat inflated now due to early-adopter distribution dynamics (that is, the reward pool is a fixed amount of STEEM per day but STEEM/SP inflation makes that worth less each day). Thus the rate of return on any fixed strategy will drop (I'm told by currently about 300% per year but I haven't checked that myself) until the floor on rewards is reached (year 2? again not sure on the numbers)
In theory yes. But some people think they know best (pride) or are bored to check what others are doing. I mean we should already be seeing analyses of users who get top curation returns (in something like a % relative to their SP) but we don't.
Indeed. The major issue of such a strategy would be vote overlaps due to too few decent + undervalued posts. But there is also the possibility of a posting boom, where we have a sharp increase in userbase and posts - and this coupled with a 5 vote limit (even as 500x 1%) would be unable to cover the board. Even multiples whales would be unable to cover it.
As for the SP rate, I've seen similar numbers with what you mention. We need some kind of visualization tool so that we can simply check past, running and future inflation rates, make calculations on SP inflation or Steem dilution from date A to date B, etc.
Perhaps a few small bounties would go a long way for getting tools like these...
But the goal is not to create a skill voting game. The goal is to have users tell us what content they like.
The goal of curation is to identify the most valued needles hidden in the haystacks in the most timely manner. At that level, users can't yet tell us what they like, because most users haven't even seen the content yet.
It has to be a skill game otherwise you are asserting that curation has no value added. (If there is value, then people will differ in their ability to deliver that value and the only way to assess those differences and maximize the value delivered in exchange for the rewards paid is via competition.)
I don't believe that there is no value, and neither does the system design (nor does the obvious observation of the amount of money spent by various companies on people and algorithms to perform curation). So lets dismiss that possibility.
People or bots (which are always controlled by people, for the time being at least) that are able to identify the most valued content the earliest are the most rewarded. That is inherently competitive and must be a skill game to function. It is also very, very close to how the current system is designed.
Not everyone will decide to compete in that game (just as not everyone will post, or comment, or mine or be a witness or develop software), some will just vote for what they like, which is perfectly fine. Others will be gamers or algorithm designers or talent scouts or promoters. There is room for all these roles and more within the broad scope of "curation".
And on top of all that, I don't see anything wrong with there being a skill game component simply for the purpose of playing the game, if that attracts interest from people who want to play (as seems to be happening to some extent already). Why not?