RE: The HF19 Maximum Curation Rewards Strategy!
"Before the percentage of upvotes on my posts shifted to so many being automatic, I used to get a lot more high value votes and actually earned more than with so many automatic votes"
This is very interesting. I assume you accounted for the drop in the price feed for Steemit that calculates your rewards?
It makes sense if people are treating their votes almost like an investment tool now. You see, what they are doing since HF-19, is diversifying.
With only 10x 100% strength votes, that only allows them 10 investments per day. You seem to be noting an effect where some users are making those 20x 50% votes per day, for example, so they can spread a wider net - not unlike the 40 votes per day pre-HF19.
"With my earnings being enough, this is fine for me but how does this impact authors barely making enough to consider Steem a hobby?"
Acutely, I would imagine. I have a couple of auto-voters who are generously supporting my posts, however as you noted, this may very well be reducing the likelihood of my posts reaching much higher payouts. Personally, if I saw a 50% reduction in rewards, it would be very difficult to justify the additional time and energy I put into Steemit given my numerous day-job responsibilities as well.
On the other hand, the generous (I assume) auto-votes from a few of my regular followers such as TeamSteem quite literally keep me going and motivate me to post at times I would be too tired otherwise.
This isn't even a double edged sword, it's a multi-edged sword.
"#1 benefit and downside to using an auto upvoter is not wasting voting power or having to even check Steem to keep earning curation rewards."
On a personal level, I certainly agree. On a holistic, platform level I would think this is a bad precedent and we want to get away from automated interaction as much as possible. Do we want to reward users who are not actually engaging on the platform?
" I would argue it is significantly lowering the value of manual curation and even reducing the amount of posts we are reading on Steem."
I would say this is absolutely true. You have highlighted a situation where the far easier "job" pays far more. This is a huge economic and game theory imbalance which will substantially color the motivation of all users in the network.
Breaking off this wall of text again into another self-reply.
"a lot of the voting power is aimed at posts from top authors"
There's that economic and game-theory imbalance we were just talking about.
"upvoting posts from popular authors early with an autovoter consistently brings upvoters 3 to 5 times more than upvoting authors not consistently earning $100 a post"
Thank you for including the data tables, it's extremely helpful and I realize one of the more laborious and underappreciated additions to a post.
The simplest solution here would be some sort of curve where curation rewards are substantially reduced for popular authors. "Popular" could be defined a number of ways - payouts, followers, reputation.
However, one thing we can all agree on is that these users do not need curation to get their posts seen. Therefore, the curation reward which is supposed to encourage unearthing and promoting high-quality posts is failing, not on a technical, but on a fundamental level.
The curation formula must be changed, lest Steem become (more of) a bot vote-trading playground. I have actually written a series of curation articles proposing various changes to curation, everything from vote-refunding for highly effective curation to changes in the reward curve.
"When competition from automatic voters gets too high on an author relative to the manual upvotes coming later, the rewards tend to drop a bit "
This makes sense. The auto-voters are probably all getting in at what they deem the optimal moment. My guess is that this is slightly before 30 minutes, in an endless game of "wanting to trigger just before all the other auto-voters trigger, while balancing the 30 min curation curve".
What this means for us manual voters is two things:
When we see your post during normal, human browsing (ie, later that evening or in a day or two), your rewards are already very high. In many cases I look at a post and think "I'd have voted for this if it was making far less, but it now has rewards sufficient to match its quality."
Users hunting for curation rewards will pass over articles that have already been mostly upvoted, which for human browsers, is probably most of the articles they see. This is because they expect to make fewer curation rewards. In some cases, they would even be better off voting on 0-reward comments of the author for curation value than the original post itself.
Breaking off this wall of text again into another self-reply.
Exactly especially when it comes to Google search which is truly equal opportunity and one of the best possible traffic sources for the long term!
Good question I may not have considered this!
We might need to slightly correct the data (hypothetically, not saying we should go back and do it) for this effect. As you know, there has been a steady trend down from about $2 over the last 3 months.