How to win at curation rewards and lose at Steem
Tagged in a 'help me get better at curation' post, and received a few messages via today on improving rewards. Alright then, you asked for it...
Firstly, do not read the content, even if you are voting manually. If the post/comment is shit or one of the farming variety, it may cloud your judgement. This is not good for maximizing rewards. Remember, you are not here to give a toss about reward pool rape or the Trending page.
Vote spammy comments knowing bigger votes are coming
Example:
The 4 lesser voters know the $1.65 vote is coming, they don't care that it is on a comment that is a copy/paste.
Tip: If you plan to run a bot to vote these comments, check regularly as the account may be hit by steemcleaners.
Check in the wallets of Bid-bots
Especially those with millions of SP. Refresh the page every couple of minutes and vote the links that appear.
Alternately, go to steemitbottracker.com, open the 'Actions' then 'details' of a larger bot and find the links there.
In time, you will know who consistently blows up their posts (bartist) with bots and so you can beat the people doing the above.
Do not follow trails
Why? They only seek the best content on Steem. What's good for Steem, is bad for your wallet in this case.
Watch what others are doing
And people wonder why I no longer give people STEEM for topping the Curation League....
However!
There are a few ways though to continue to support the content you like and improve your Curation Rewards.
Per author:
Watch their steemworld.org votes following a new post - early is good, but not too early. Just try to be in front of the first vote that is around the same size as the one you want to issue.
Use this fancy page in tandem with the above to back-check a good time/weight for the author: https://beempy.com/curation/@abh12345/drugwars-now-on-steem
Find decent comments on the posts of authors who like to support their commentators / curators. Yep, you gotta read for this one, sorry.
Conclusion: The best curation rewards are mostly earned by supporting the authors and content that you should probably be flagging.
This post was brought to you by a grumpy abh12345 who should be starting work soon and earning some fiat to by crypto but is instead watching the likes of SBD do 50% in 10 mins last night.
Have an awesome day!
Man, I had no idea. Those comment ones, astonishing. And not in a good way. FFS SMH FML ETC.
The amount of this abuse that is going on is pretty saddening. Steemcleaners have their work cut out!
They do. I read a post the other day in which there were people saying steemcleaners would have their delegation pulled and all sorts of nonsense. Absolutely not, man. It's the scale in which these people do things as well. Just ripping the piss
If it's pulled then stuff like this wont be stopped even if it is spotted. Not many people willing to give up their stake to down-vote. Using Steemit incs stake this way is a good use case imo.
Even though I agree that steemcleaners are doing a good job to prevent this sort of theft or whatever one might call it... And I would also say that we need them. However, I have problems understanding how they actually work, as they seem to be okay with some people doing crazy stuffs, meanwhile they flag others for doing the same thing.
One could argue that they just missed that particular abuse, but that doesn't feel right, as steemcleaners would have to be blind to miss certain abuse...
I understand. It seems that in the past, some people are untouchable?
No-ones perfect though, and they sure have a lot of work on their hands.
Very true. No one is perfect, but I still find it odd to let some people slip under the radar so to speak. Especially when it comes to a service like this. They should treat everyone the same way. If one person is allowed to spam, everyone should be allowed to do it. Looks weird when they see between the fingers dozens of times for certain users.
I wholeheartedly agree, it's one of the best use cases
A good way to earn good curation rewards and vote on good content is to follow @ocd. When we start curating again by voting on the posts found by OCD acidyo always follows up with a big vote so you can reward good authors by putting in less work.
Yes, I have written about curation more positively in the past and did mention the large late vote (that isn't the master account) coming from the likes of utopian-io, acidyo as a much more respectable way to earn rewards. It will be good to have OCD back :)
Hi Asher if you want to earn curation you need to dodge the popular authors. The trap is the users that follow a $200 or $300 post. More can be made on posts with less rewards as they have fewer votes. You can still make decent rewards by curating properly, but it is not easy. Curation returns on your posts are normally not great lol, but that shouldn't be the aim. Engagement should be first and curation is the bonus.
Unpopular authors with good payouts are a good source. But you have to ask yourself, why are they unpopular? If it smells fishy, it's normally fishy, or something else, which I won't speak of :)
edit: ahh you've spotted that you can't earn much curation on my posts :) And this is with me not sticking a 50 cent vote on it at 8/9/10 mins. Sigh.
Very true, but also they could be just performing under the radar. I have no issues if it is a decent post and I know there is 100 Steem coming later. This will make up for the 20 votes that were average.
They could.... and they could also be a sock-puppet banging out multiple posts a day being voted by their chief delegator ;)
That would be the norm I agree. That is why it is best to dodge those as they don't really care if you are voting or not as they will never reply to a comment.
Lol. I knew people were voting strategically. I get masses of tiny trail votes on my posts, but I'd rather have more comments. I wonder how much some of them actually make. I vote entirely manually and don't care much about what I make from curation.
There's someone who retaliated for some @steemflagrewards action, but also votes on posts by members to earn something. Not that they have enough sp to make much.
If they do it 5000 times a week, they actually do pretty well, and for very little time invested.
You can't make it up sometimes can you :D
Yeah, I can attest to that. The guy mostly attacks SFR flaggers with close to dust level payout. Then, he snipes the bigger flaggers for rewards.
It's comical really.
Or, one can play a longer term game as I do and give up larger curation rewards by:
Curating everything you vote on and not autovoting.
Still vote on a post that is hours old and pretty much has most all the votes it is going to receive (like this one), because you support the author/message.
By doing this, you strengthen those you naturally interact with (not only the author, but those who came before you voting) and chances are good that sometimes those same people will be interested in your posts and their accounts being stronger as time progresses will allow for them to vote better on you.
And, sometimes one shouldn't think it is about the rewards maybe? There are a few I have kind of adopted who I am convinced will never reach minnow status, yet I like what they post. They enrich my world by posting what they post, and that is more valuable than the fact they will probably always be a dust vote. Who knows, maybe in a couple years I can single handedly make them minnows, lol.
It's an honorable approach to take, but you make a good point regarding that late vote appearing - it is certainly more noticeable than the raft that appear during the first 15 minutes, and could certainly work in your favour, along with a comment showing why the vote arrived. e.g. interest in the topic.
A Red Fish shared, is a Minnow in double time. See if you can get them noticed by c-squared or ocd, or curie :)
Good morning (here) "grumpy" @abh12345! 😉 Having a little time this morning and reading this for the first time, I appreciate you putting it together. I have bookmarked it in @steempeak, for future reference. As I have wondered about this from time to time, I think you have written the most informative Steem post I have ever read on the subject. So, a full upvote and resteem … 👍
The engineer in me enjoys the technical details on how to try and “wire” the curation rewards in Steem. But doing it in the “optimum” way overall for Steem to increase in value. The “real life” guy online for the first time ever and trying to balance the time to actively and consistently engage “in here” with “real world” responsibilities, though, simply doesn’t have the time (and not likely to in the foreseeable future) to be too concerned about it. I do the best I can, with the time I have to invest and let "the chips fall" where they may …
I hope this all comes together for you sooner rather than later @abh12345, as I know it is a source of real concern and aggravation. All the best to you!
LoL
I knew I was doing it all wrong!
Earn that fiat dude, if there's another dip, you'll be happy you did
Trying my best! I had a role lined up but it's 'on hold' until who knows when. On the lookout for something else though.
And yep, fortunately there are enough people doing it 'wrong' to not make Steem a total farce :)
On the plus side: these curation snipers get more curation rewards than what they add to the author rewards, effectively taking rewards from the voter farmers. If they deserve the rewards is on another page, though...
Would be better without, but not worth to be grumpy, Cheers!
True :)
And yes I'm just grumpy, not so much to do with curation, or the lack of it 'for Steem' these days.
I have a home and a bed, this is a good start :)
The overall % of the curation reward doesn't change as far as I can tell.
The only time I have seen vote farmers earning less is when the sniper is the sole "other" voter in the scenario. Otherwise, the sniper just gets the bigger share of the 25% allocation and the author is more or less unaffected. Of course, these "authors" tend to be voting for themselves with more than one account anyhow.
You're right, the overall % of curation rewards does not change. The author earns exactly 75% of the sum of vote values while all curators together get up to 25%. I was assuming (without explicitly saying, sorry) that the larger voter and the author are the same person/account/group. In that case, the author share is slightly increased by the curation snipers, but the curation share of author and large voter together can be reduced by more than this value.
Ah, such pure joy it is to read how maximizing your returns means curating trash.
For all the good things we say about Steem on the twitters, mediums, facebooks... theres just as much crap we can say..
(But lets not. hahaha)
Promote the good stuff on twitter, and occasionally bitch about the annoying stuff here has been my policy for a while :)
Guilty, I'm gonna admit that I've started with "Vote spammy comments knowing bigger votes are coming" this but until than I didn't get how curation worked. Because I didn't get any rewards.
As with the HF20 I got pretty pissed with the RC costs that I was able to comment 20 times a day or week I can't remember right now but it felt bad. So I decided to write a bot to curate. Now that bot returns like 2.5%/day so I would say not bad. I'm not upvoting shitty content but dsound posts because why not. And that was the easiest to write as a bot :)
Only option to earn from steem is either bidbots or whale friends so I don't think that's too bad to curate a project. Actually it's way better than delegating to a bidbot from my perspective.
So instead of the list above, I would suggest everyone to do the same especially those who delegate to bidbots.
I see your bot, glad it's working for you, and dsound is a pretty legit way to go.
Curating a project, or contributing to one will be the only way in the future, unless you have those whale buddies, which are becoming less and less.