Maximizing Curation Rewards - With Science!
I'm taking a scientific approach to maximizing my curation rewards.
Like Galileo dropped the orange...
I've been taking a break from upvotes for a short while, in order to allow my voting power to build back up to 100%. Normally I wouldn't think it was very important to top up all the way – but this is for SCIENCE!
The Science of Steem Power
The way I see it, when your voting power is maxed out you are basically wasting it. You’re just letting your voting power sit idle. It’s not recharging (because it can’t charge over 100%), and it’s not earning you rewards (because you just won’t vote for some reason).
By using your voting power to upvote quality content, you can earn curation rewards for yourself. Every post splits rewards between author and curators, with 75% for the author and 25% shared among the curators. Curators get a higher share of the rewards if they upvote earlier than others do; however, if you upvote in the first 30 minutes, some of the curation rewards from your vote automatically revert to the author.
To oversimplify, maximum curation rewards happen when you upvote content that other people like, before they upvote it, but not so early that the rewards bounce back to the author. There is an art to it, but there is also a lot of science.
From here on out, I plan to take a more organized approach to curation. Toward that end, I will begin a scientific experiment aimed at maximizing my curation rewards. In order to do that right, I need to start from 100% voting power. I have data to collect!
Learn more details about curation reward payouts here, courtesy of @sndbox.
Testing the Reward Rates of Steemit Curation Models
After my voting power is fully recharged, I'll start using a new curation model. After a week, I'll see what the results were. Then I'll let my voting power rest until it's back up to 100% (a day or so) before I start testing a new curation model. After another week I'll recharge again and move on to the next model, then keep going like that until I'm out of test models.
Captain's log...
I’m going to report my curation results here on the blog so you can keep up with how I’m doing. What I won’t report is the details of each curation model. I plan to just label them with letters; maybe they’ll earn names.
I’m sure a clever monkey could reverse engineer the curation models I’m using. Some will be automatic; some will be manual; most will specify some percentage of auto and leave a remaining percentage for manual. Manual curation will still follow a general plan, it just won’t be quite so formulaic.
Ultimately, I’d like to test whether manual curation is inherently better than automatic, but that question is really beyond the scope of this experiment. I’m simply trying to determine the best curation model. I have about half a dozen candidates to test right now, out of the nearly infinite possibilities. I might test more or fewer models, depending on the results I get.
My target result is weekly curation rewards totaling >0.5% of my starting SP balance.
I have seen some curators get better results than that; I have not seen them maintain it. If I get results like that, I may just go ahead and put the experiment on hold while I collect fistfuls of passive Steem Power.
How You Can Participate
If you would like to participate in my Maximum Curation Reward Scientific Experiment, you can follow my "olyup" curation trail using either Streemian or SteemAuto.
A lot of Steemians use Streemian and SteemAuto for automatic voting, following curation trails, and scheduled posts. If you don’t, go ahead and start now. During sign-up, permissions are set up via SteemConnect for security. Just use SteemConnect to assign posting privileges to whichever service you choose. Then you can start to follow my curation trail automatically, along with any of the other great features both services offer.
- Visit my olyup curation trail page on Streemian and click "Join Trail" to follow my curation trail.
- On SteemAuto, search the list of curators for olyup, then click “follow” to follow my trail.
Before long, this experiment will show me a reliable curation model to return 0.5% of my Steem Power balance every week. You won’t find that ROI on your funds in a bank, and all you need to do to earn a rate like that here on Steemit is upvote quality content, or else mimic the upvotes of someone who does by following a curation trail.
I’ll post my rewards with customized curation here on my blog.
Follow my trail on Streemian or SteemAuto to earn curation rewards like mine for yourself.
Chat about Steem and share a dank meme on my Discord.
I think this post gonna help you to use good tags. Any way great Post ! Keep it up my dude! https://steemit.com/steemit/@pathi/how-to-use-relevant-tags-in-your-post-to-get-more-upvotes-and-followers
I was trying to figure out how to earn more with my SP. I am terrible at finding good material. A 0.5% ROI weekly is not much but certainly better than any bank. I will look into this. Thanks.
I think auto-voting helps most users increase their curation rewards, mainly because most users just don't vote as much as they could. Either pick your own auto-voting or follow a good curator.
Average curation results are probably 0.1% per week, maybe less, which only works out to 5% a year. Getting 0.5% a week would be stellar results, almost 30% in a year just for upvoting.