Newbie Question: Curation Rewards
I was under the impression that to maximize my curator rewards I needed to vote mainly on big posts and to do so as early as possible. I've been doing this now for the past week. I managed to be in the first 1-4 votes on several big earning posts from well trending people. I've been monitoring the new posts all week and voting/resteeming to do this all week.
The first post paid out earlier this evening but to my disappointment I didn't get anything even though I was nearly the first person to upvote it. Is this normal? Is it a delayed process or is it simply that I don't have enough steem power to get any slice of that pie regardless of how early I was.
Needless to say I am pretty disappointed, I hope I didn't waste a week trying to earn curator rewards for nothing. Does anyone have any further information on how they work? I figured if I was first or even within the top 5 I would get something at least, I didn't expect nothing though. I'm declining payout on this as I'm not trying to gripe for votes I'm just disappointed and don't want to waste my time.
Thanks for reading and your help.
Zach
Source: Pixabay
Your basic understanding is fine, but you may be missing one crucial point. In order to avoid bots being able to instantly vote on posts, or people voting without even reading/commenting, there is a 30 minute period from the creation of a post where curators do not earn full rewards. Curation rewards gradually "phase in" as the post ages. If you vote within the first minute of a post being created, you forfeit all your curation rewards to the author. If you vote at minute 15, you forfeit 50% of your rewards and so on.
This of course created a whole new layer of optimal voting strategy, it essentially functions like an auction now. If you know someone is popular, you may want to get in ahead of some of the votes, but not so early you gain nothing, so the optimal voting time is different for each post/author.
And yes your SP does factor in a lot, so even if your timing is perfect, if you didn't contribute much to the post rewards, you also won't get a whole lot of curation rewards in return. My advice is not to worry about it, and vote on what you like and enjoy. Let the rewards take care of themselves passively in the background!
Ah! That's what I was missing. I voted on all of these within the first few minutes. Well that makes things more difficult cause I can't just browse new looking for good stuff lol. Thanks for your help! This is definitely the issue I've been having.
Your welcome. As @preparedwombat mentions here too, your SP is a big limiting factor as well. It'll take some time until curation turns into rewards of note, but it really functions like dividends in a bank account. If you leave it alone and just keep at it, the compounding effect can really add up.
Awesome thank you guys very much for the useful tips! I'm going to adjust my strategy this week and see if I can come up with one that works well for me!
Do you happen to have a better resource than this https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/ I've been basing my strategy off of it and it must be massively outdated. Did they make a post or something about it?
Zach your understanding of how curation works it in need of some homework. Time to but open the books and do a little more study as you are way off my Friend :) No shortcuts here, the information is easy enough to find...
I got my information from https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/
Is that out of date?
What determines how much of the curation reward goes to the author versus curators?
Can I get curation rewards for upvoting comments?
Do I get curation rewards for downvoting posts or comments?
What are curation trails?
https://steemit.com/faq.html
Omg I never even knew that was there lol. I've been googling every thing and using that information... Thanks!
So a good lesson learned when dealing with a community, corporation or company always but always keep your searches withing the resources directly available and never go outside and use 3rd party resources unless you are willing to settle for 3rd party results.
Now you can't expect to get a cookie cutter solution as this is business and everyone has to design their own strategies based upon applying what you learn from studying the available resources and then applying them. Something like if you know where and how to tickle the beast he will sometimes drop a little gingle :)
There's a lot there that is out of date. Curation is no longer 50% of rewards, the 20 votes per day metric isn't a given after the recent hardfork, and I don't see any mention of the initial 30 minute block I mention in my other comment.
I think it is not worth deliberetly spending time (time has value) on curation, unles you got 100K+ of Steem Power under your hood. Yet it would be still a lottery, as it depends on how early you vote, are you oone of the first to do this, and how many will come after you to do the same job. Very complex game. Needs power, experience and patience.