Steemvote 0.3 Released

Steemvote 0.3 has been released, and it has some cool new features. Here are some details on the new functionality.

Interface

There's now a graphical user interface (GUI) for steemvoter, the curator program. The GUI is used by default when starting the program, but you can disable it with the --terminal command-line argument.

Using the GUI, you can add, remove, and edit your authors while steemvoter is running. This way, you don't have to restart the program to change your settings. You can also see the posts that steemvoter is going to vote on.

Priorities

Steemvote now uses a priority system. Each author has a priority (low, normal, or high), so you can choose which authors to vote on depending on your current voting power. This is a more intuitive way of rationing voting power than the old system that 0.2 used.

Your voting power is being "wasted" when it's at 100%. That's a good reason to have low-priority authors which you'll vote on when your voting power gets too high. The exact meaning of "too high" is up to you, but I tend to choose 99%.

Priorities are further augmented by the fact that you can set the weight of your vote on a per-author basis. One author may get a full (100% weight) vote, while another may only get a 75% weight vote. By default, everyone gets a full vote.

Delegates

Some curators are good enough to imitate. 0.3 adds support for delegates. When you add a user to your delegates, steemvoter will vote on everything that they vote on. In other words, you delegate your voting power to them.

Just like authors, delegates can have priority levels. So you could, for example, vote on everything that @trogdor votes for when your voting power is above 99.2%.

Delegates are a good way to sink some of your voting power when you don't have enough authors to vote on. The relationship between you and a delegate is symbiotic - both of you get more curation rewards. (The delegate benefits more from this arrangement, though.)

Future Plans

An automated curator is most effective when it acts as an extension of its user. Curation is a very nuanced game. It follows that steemvote should be more customizable - able to support more complicated logic regarding whether to vote on something. That's one of the main things I have in mind. Another thing is that steemvote should be able to report on its results over the long term (e.g. curation reward amounts).

You can find steemvote on Github. git clone https://github.com/Kefkius/steemvote will retrieve the latest release.