Curation strategy: "Covering the board"

Last week, due to lack of time, I kind of shifted my curation strategy. Not having much time to read, I still had to cast my votes for something. So I generally tried to upvote posts that had less than 1$ - preferably near 0.00$ (and after 10-20-30 minutes have passed - the later the better).

I voted for posts which based on what I saw on my feed (author, content type, title) seemed to have a potential to go upwards.

This type of strategy seemed to have worked because at some point I've peaked at 4.5 SP in curation rewards in a day, when I wouldn't gain half as much.

Note that my upvote is worth 0.01 to 0.02, so 40 votes per day x 0.02 = 80 cents max of upvote value (typically less than that - around 50-60 cents).

Now, 3 to 4.5 SP in curation rewards can be like 3-5 times higher compared to the 80 cents of my upvotes. And I wasn't even using all of my upvotes in this way: I used some for comments and posts that had already large payouts.

Now, that is kind of scary because if I was a whale I think this would work even better: I would spend just 1-2 of my large votes, by splitting them in 100 to 200 votes of 1% power and upvoting, say, 100-200 posts, following the same rationale of picking undervalued posts as I used above (posts near 0.00 which seem to have some potential due to title/author/type of content).

In this way I would be following a "cover the whole board" strategy where a lot of my picks would be winners - since I've picked almost anything upvote-worthy. Other whales would HAVE to vote for something and the vast majority of them obviously won't be voting for total garbage. So, they'll HAVE to hit some of my upvoted links. And my <1$ worth of my upvote is not going to dissuade them from adding their vote on my vote - because it's not going to shave that much of their curation reward - but it should still be very profitable for me, even if I discount all the "misses".

So if I am a whale and have covered all the good-looking-posts (pretty easy in our current phase due to the lack of content that there is), insta-voted anything undervalued of high-rep, etc etc, then when other whales vote on the content, I should get a good multiple of my vote's worth.

And even if the content I upvoted is not the best quality, there's not much to worry about: It's just a few cents worth of upvotes. The reputation implications are probably higher.

Now, these 1-2 votes which will be avoiding any already voted content with any value >1$ (preferably not >0.1$), instead of getting me 25% of the upvote value of a full power vote after the 30m mark, would probably fetch me more than 100% of its upvote value, if my experience with 0.02$ votes (>300-500%) is anything to go by. This should be a pretty good return.

With the 5 votes recharging change, things might change quite a bit, so we'll have to wait and see how something like that will work in the new incentives environment.