Curation Report (End-June) [with observations on HF19]

Two reports in ten days? It simply has been that turbulent in the world of Steem curation.

Be warned, as always, this will be an in-depth rant into the curation world, so it's only for curation geeks like myself.

In my last report, right after Hardfork 19, I noted that the payouts were way higher than expected. Things seemed too good to be true - and they were. The reward_balance had ballooned up during the HF18 era for some reason, and was being expended. This results in exaggerated payouts for everyone. Things are balancing out, though I know not when and how an equilibrium will be reached. The current reward_balance is 1.087 million Steem; the 30 day reward pool is 1.44 million.

During the last 10 days and the 7 days prior to Hardfork 19, I went on a curation rampage. I made over 1,500 votes, reaching out to over 800 new authors. I didn't have time or voting power to curate comments though, so this could have been much higher. Every night, my Voting Power would be in the 3%-5% range.

I also rented SP one week prior to HF19, and that turned out to be extremely profitable. It seems like everyone thought the rates were ridiculous, so I got lucky to be one of the few to see the value in it. I didn't think the reward pool would be so exaggerated, though!

Now, things are starting to balance out, and as such, so are my strategies. I can't afford to pay much more for rentals anymore, but I'm still in the market. In my previous report, I mentioned how using high voting strengths while taking your voting power as low as possible would be beneficial to begin with. However, in my simulations, from the third week onwards both approaches pretty much even out as the regeneration achieves an equilibrium for both. So, I'll start mixing and matching, giving out 100% votes to the most engaging posts, while going with lower strengths for lesser but still worthy content. Combined with downscale of curation, my VP will be much higher than the 5% it has been averaging. Today is the first time I've seen it above 10% since a few hours after HF19!

My general curation strategy remains unchanged, looking for undiscovered posts. This is mostly new authors, but sometimes I'd also run into a gem of a post by an older author that has gone undiscovered. I have finally integrated Esteem.life in my workflow. However, it still has some bugs which I'd like to see fixed. Still, with 20,000 posts being made daily nowadays, I can only consider reading a couple of hundred posts a day.

Digging through the depths of Steemit also gives you a great perspective to how Hardfork 19 has really impacted Steem. There are no real surprises here - it's pretty much all as expected, the good and the bad. Do note that this is all anecdotal observations.

• Earlier, I often felt like I was the only one digging through the new posts in my timezone, as most posts were stuck at $0.00. But now, I can see minnow votes on many posts. $0 posts are far less common nowadays, they always seem to have a few cents on them.

• Minnows are curating and resteeming much more. Linear rewards have definitely revitalized the community. The raw number of voters is approaching 20,000 - nearly 2x from a couple of weeks ago.

• There's a VERY long tail of author rewards. The top authors are making much less than before - the days of one post taking up 10% (i.e. multiple thousands of dollars) of the reward pool are far behind us. A top post is currently taking less ~1% of the reward pool now, which seems like a healthy amount of inequality to me.

• Similarly, there's a long tail of curators. Earlier, the top 100 curators on Steemdb.com accounted for 90+% of the R-shares. But really 98+% when accounting for V-shares - effective influence. Even during the experiment, this was well above 90%. Today, the top 100 curators only account for 70% of overall influence. That's an improvement of 1400% in distribution!

• The square_root curation curve emphasizes early voting slightly less than the older system. It still ensures that voting on a trending post is a complete waste of voting power, but at the same time, you can vote on something which has $10-$50 and still make a decent curation reward. Especially if it's picked up by other voters. I feel this is a net positive, and the current algorithm seems pretty well balanced overall.

• There's a scourge of self-voting and collusive voting. This is a serious problem that many of us saw coming, but the witnesses and developers turned a blind eye to. I'm seeing rampant self-voting and collusive voting, thanks to the 4x increase in the 100% vote. But wait, it's even worse than that. People are voting others with 10%-25% strengths, saving the 100% for themselves and their colluders. So, the self-vote is probably 10x as powerful as it was before. The end result is pretty grotesque. The abuse fighters simply can't keep up, and this is going unchecked. I have requested statistics earlier this week for the rise in self-upvotes. The voting power rate was just fine as it was. I was willing to be open minded about it, but it's now clear it's been an unmitigated disaster.

I've written a lot recently about curating responsibly, and I'm afraid that concept has been thrown out the window. To their credit, most curators are doing very well, but some are flirting with corrupt curation; some with large stakes or delegated stakes even. I'm also disturbed by the sheer amount of people getting in touch, offering me something in return for votes. All this is expected of a corrupt free market, of course, but is a dangerous slippery slope which might reduce Steem to a scammer's utopia. I use hyperbole because action is necessary.

Overall, HF19 has been a very positive story, except for one major blemish. There's no talk of fixing this either - I wonder if the witnesses and developers are even aware of this problem? I hope they are, and I hope solutions are in the works.

So, that's it. This will be my last curation report for the next few months, if all goes well. Feel free to get in touch with me on Steemit.chat if you have any further questions.

As always, I'd leave the shameless plug and request you follow my curation trail at Streemian.