Vote Buying and Curation in the HF20 World

Wanted to share a couple things I've noticed since HF20 went live. Would love people's thoughts on these topics as I always view my posts as the start of a conversation. Engagement does seem to be down since HF20 and that needs to change so lets get this conversation rolling.

Curation Rewards

I'll be honest curation rewards aren't something I gave much thought to in the past as the odds of getting much of anything due to the way people would 0 minute upvote lowering the curation percentage meant the rewards pretty much sucked. Worse if you were actually online and someone posted you needed to wait 30 minutes for the full curation value to be applied...way to long.

Anyways at this point I just noticed a nice 0.023 SP curation reward for an autovote I gave to @pifc with a value of around 0.10. This is huge, truly gained around 25% back as a curation reward with a vote that landed at 15 minutes, but behind a fairly large vote which hits at 14 minutes. Hint to everyone out there, SBI votes at 14 minutes so if you want to front run them you will need to do 13 minutes.

The effects of changing to a 15 minute window and must importantly making the portion that used to go to the author return to the vote pool has actually increased curation rewards. This is a very good thing IMO. Wasn't so sure how the actual effects of this would play out, but seems to be working as there don't seem to be nearly as many people using a 0 minute self vote currently to lower the amount paid in curation.

Now to be clear, in my opinion Curation Rewards are just a nice bonus and not the end goal of a vote. For real profits cast your votes to people you engage with and those who support you. Not saying go vote for vote, but if someone ignores you post after post when you comment and upvote them why are you supporting them? Stop and find someone that cares about you and is willing to support your growth. Long term growth comes from finding people to connect with and help each other. Not by casting random votes hoping for a curation reward and surely not by voting for people who can't be bothered to reply to or upvote your comments to them.

Vote Buying

With the changes to the curation it makes vote buying a lot harder to have a gain by the time the post rewards hit. I think that those with fixed returns are going to need to increase the value from 110% after curation to at least 115% to make it more attractive IMO. 110% worked because most people weren't actually paying out that much in the end. This allowed for the changes in the markets and overall total bids effecting the reward pool which many times means your post display value isn't accurate and decreases over the 7 days.

So without changes to the vote sellers payouts which will reduce the return for sellers I think that vote buying will decrease for those who looked at it as a way to increase profits. I'll be upfront, I was trying to buy profitable votes to maximize the value I was powering up before HF20. It was working nicely except smartsteem never had enough votes for me...lol. Some of the posts they had less then 4 SBD worth of votes to sell. My last post I checked and could have sent them 65 SBD or 80 something steem. WOW...that tells me the vote buyers are drying up and kind of proves my point that 110% just isn't enough now. I bought 5SBD worth to see the effect and while it was slightly positive it's not enough to risk if the markets drop or some whales make a few massive votes and screw up the entire reward pool before payout. 10% margin can vanish almost overnight.

What have you noticed about curation rewards and/vote buying since the fork? Have you made any adjustments to your voting patterns? Am I crazy for thinking you actually read the entire post and are seeing these questions?