RE: A quick look at Steem's rewards for curator-investors
At the low end of the SP scale the rewards are so very small as to make a curation not worthwhile.
Yeah, this is something I was thinking about after I made this post. There's a bit of a paradox here. The smaller accounts are the ones that are best able to increase their returns by discovering attractive content and front-running the bigger voters, but the incentive is not really there to get them to spend a lot of time doing it.
Your idea of rewarding people in the diary game for powering up 100% might help with that. Lots of people can spend less time per person and accomplish the same thing. I was also thinking it might encourage investment to have the web site report curation rewards as a percentage, in addition to the 7-day total. (with constant influx from rewards and interest, possible outflows from power-downs, and potential delegations in both directions, I realize that this isn't as easy as it sounds, though...)
I've also had a long-time idea of having a curation league, where people could compete for the best curation percentage during a period of time like a week or a month, but it seems pretty hard to prevent someone from cheating by following themselves with alt-accounts, so I'm not sure how well that would work.
It would be interesting to present some numbers to newcomers particularly to show how accumulating SP can begin to bring them curation rewards.
I agree with this. It would probably be good to automate the kind of collection that I did here, run it regularly, and incorporate many more accounts into the analysis so people can get a real idea of what their investment can get them. Again, easier said then done, though...
@remlaps, I am trying really hard to understand how curation works on this system - but I need the kindergarten explanation because, as a newbie (recent returning Steemian), I still don't understand very well how the curation process and BOTS, work. Honestly, I am torn between trudging onward or putting my time and energy elsewhere because my returns are so small.
I wrote Discussing the factors that drive Steem's curation rewards back in June. Also, that article has a link to The Ultimate Guide to Voting Power (with cartoons, formulas, and code references!), which was written by @biophil in 2016. Maybe those will help.
Oversimplifying, the way it works is that 50% of every post goes to the author and the other 50% gets split among all the different voters, but it doesn't get split evenly. In general, the earlier voters and the voters with the largest stakes get bigger shares of the rewards (except that you generally don't want to vote on posts in the first 5 minutes because there's a voting penalty during that time in order to slow down the bots).
So, as a voter, your goal is to vote on posts that you think will eventually become valuable, but do it before they receive any large upvotes. Right now, voting on well-written posts in the diary game before @steemcurator01 or any other large voters do is probably a decent voting strategy. Or maybe check the "New" section in Project HOPE for well-written posts that haven't received big votes yet.
The other thing that's important is to make sure that you vote numerous times every day, at least 10 full-power votes per day. You can monitor your voting power on steemdb.io/@openmindedtravel, and you never want that to sit idle at 100% for very long (or at all).
Bots is a more complicated topic, and I don't really know what options are out there. I've written some of my own, but they're not really suitable for general use. I'd suggest exploring the site https://auto.steemdb.online/, but I'm honestly not very familiar with what's available. Maybe someone else can provide some more insights.
Hope that helps!