RE: Newbie Question: Curation Rewards
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than this https://steem.io/getinvolved/paid-to-curate/ I've been basing my strategy off of it and it must be massively outdated.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?