The Optimal Time to Vote !

Hi everybody!

Here’s some more in-depth information about the Curation mechanics with the goal of educating Steemians - and especially Gem followers - on the optimal time to vote. If you have no knowledge at all about the Curation mechanics, I would advise to read this one first. Here we go!

Striving for maximal Curation Rewards, there are two main factors to consider:

The Weight of your Vote
&
30-minute Rule

Of course, your SP and Voting Power also play an important role in determining your Curation reward. But as both are linearly correlated to payouts, it is not interesting to look at these factors from the perspective of this post. It is abundantly clear that the more SP you have and the more your Voting Power has regenerated, the higher your Curation payout will be. This piece is aiming for a smarter approach and will analyse the mechanics to determine the best time to cast your upvote.

Regardless of your SP and Voting Power, the weight of your vote and the 30-minute rule can always be optimized, without any cost and to your great benefit if done well.

The Weight of your Vote

The Steem-developers have created a smart way to reward Steemians for Curating new content. The earliest Votes on each post are treated with greater significance compared to the ones that come in later.

“In particular, we want to reward voting on posts that the network has the “least information” about. This means that being the first person to vote for a post gives you the greatest possible weight for your STEEM Power. “ - Source: https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/

So the message in this statement is, that the order of voting is important. In the following section, the Math behind the algorithm is explained. It is quite complicated so I would advise to skip to the part about the 30-minute rule if you don’t like math.

Some Math

Lets calculate through some examples to see the effect of Voting Order. Look at the overview below. In this example, the weak votes are cast early.

Vote = The product of your SP and Voting Power
Weights = The weight assigned to each Vote
Percent = The percentage of the Curation reward pool this is assigned to the Vote

So the first vote, worth 1, weighs 100% as there are no other contributors at that point. The second vote, also worth 1, weighs 25% its relative contribution (and therefore payout) is 4 times smaller.

After some experimenting, I have found a formula to calculate your Vote’s Weight:

(Formula free to use and copy, please include a reference to this post)

Look at the 4th vote from previous example. It is worth 1, bringing the NewTotal to 4. The OldTotal is of course 3. Therefore, the Vote’s weight must be 100 /(((4/(4-3))^2) = 6.25

In this second example, the heaviest vote is cast early. As you can see, this makes a great difference in the end result for all votes. The weaker votes lose up to 30 times their share in the total Curation rewards.

Using the same formula, look at the 4th vote again. It is worth 1, bringing the NewTotal to 7. The OldTotal is 6. Therefore, the Vote’s weight must be 100/(((7/(7-6))^2) = 2.04

Because of the heavy early upvote in the second example, there is only 2% left for the upvote that was worth 6% of Curation rewards in the first example. The greatest difference is naturally visible between the first vote in the first example, and the last vote in the second example. The same amount of Steem Power in the same Reward Pool is worth 30 times more!

30-minute rule

The 30-minute rule is intended to prevent bots from auto-voting popular Authors. It ensures that upvotes that are cast very early after release of the post, contribute a larger amount to the Author reward and lesser to the Curation reward. It is not a very intelligent rule as bots can easily be programmed to upvote a post after a specific duration. It is kind of an obscure rule too, as it is not mentioned on the Steemit website. Its effects are very noticeable though:

Consider the following example: You are the only Curator on a post, that earns exactly $ 1.00

If you cast your upvote immediately after posting, your Curation payout will be zero, as the 30-minute rule will assign the full weight of the vote to the Author.
If you cast your upvote after 30 minutes, your vote will bring you the optimal Curation payout of $0.25 (total Curation Reward on a post is 25% if all votes are cast after 30 minutes)

If you are not the only Curator on a post, the Vote Weight comes into play. As discussed, when more then 1 Curator upvotes a post - which is practically always the case -a comparison is made between the relative contribution in Steem Power of each vote. This will always result in the earlier votes getting a greater weight.

Conclusion

Now we can draw some conclusions! Considering the Weight of your Vote and the 30-minute Rule, the optimal time to cast your Vote is when 30 minutes have passed and you are still the first one to Vote. This will maximize both the Weight of your Vote and the percentage of the Vote going to Curation. When you can not be the first to cast your Vote at the 30 minute mark, the Voter needs to make an assessment. Can I afford to wait or is the increased Weight on my Vote able to compensate for the percentage of the reward that is going to the Author?

Recommendations

Opposite to the 30-minute Rule, which is a fixed influencer, the Weight of the Vote graph is different for each post. This means that the optimal time to vote is also different for each post. However, it is possible to make a fairly good estimate. Empirical evidence is showing the average optimal upvote time is just before 15 minutes after the post was released. An update will follow with the optimal voting times for the Curator Gem when there is enough data available.

Keep in mind that Curators are competing with another to:

1.Be the first to upvote great content
2.Hold off voting to increase Curation rewards

Closing remarks

To help the above sink in, let me end with an analogy. Say we have a gameshow, where 2 candidates have a button. On a screen, a figure is growing from $1 to $1000. If one candidate presses the button, he or she gets the money, while the other gets nothing. If both do not press before $1000, both get $750 (so the total payout would be greatest if that happened). However, individually, at the moment the figure has hit $751, it would be favorable for either candidate to press.

If this article was helpful to you please consider upvoting, following and resteeming! And of course, check out

The Curator Gems!!