Noticed I made it to the top author list on 
I guess now's the best time to post when price of hive is low and user activity is lower, right?
Looking back at some of my posting activity the past couple years you can notice a lot of discrepancies, some times even months apart. As someone in Hive for the long-term it does kind of make you think "how much Hive did I leave on the table by not posting", but at the same time as a curator you also think "who got that hive instead?". The answer is obviously everyone shared it equally who were active posting, the other question I guess is "what happened to that hive?" which doesn't have an easy answer.
I'm not regretting that I didn't post or force myself to post, I've been rather busy working on my projects I want to also have a long-term view on this blockchain. It's easy to some times notice when some people "force themselves" to post, the quality and effort may drop, the engagement levels on the post may also drop and the time spent on engaging with your engagement and other posts by other users generally drops as well as the authors try to just get the rewards for as little effort as possible.
Another thing that autovotes kind of mess that activity up is that they don't notice these things that manual curators or regular users would. So the rewards they get are often not changed by the way they go about their content and activity. I also realize that these authors may get some kind of entitlement from the whole ordeal and get "hooked" on seeing the pending rewards stay consistent or go higher in terms of Hive for their account's growth. This may lead to some uncomfortable situations if someone were to interfere with downvotes even if they're coming off of it from the right angle because of how used the author may have gotten to the constant support by then.
The big question I've pondered over time is: how can we reward manual curators more without it relying on downvotes lowering the returns of auto/blind votes. It's something that's hard to do on the blockchain level due to its feeless nature. Services like hive.vote let you easily and for free set up trails and autovotes on authors, you can set it and forget it without giving too much thought on how the authors you're supporting evolve from there.
In a way you can look at autovotes/trails as a subscription method similar to patreon, you really like the content this author is generating and it doesn't "cost" you anything to consistently support this author. When it comes to patreon they're taking $ from you monthly so you're more prone to think it over if you want to continue supporting this person on a monthly basis but there too you may forget about it as can easily happen in this day and age with subscription payments becoming the norm. But when it's not costing you anything you're even more prone to forget about it and not bother to look back which may have unintended consequences on the ecosystem as a whole.
Okay so without looking at downvotes to regulate auto/blind votes and cause drama for the authors who also get penalized from them along with the voters. I started thinking that manual voters could get an advantage simply by leaving a comment.
Naturally not every post you consume gives you enough reason to place a comment, some times nothing may come to mind to add to the post or it may come off as something that seems too simple like "nice post", but it kind of also depends who is voting and leaving that comment. If all you do is only leave "nice post" comments or comments that may seem disingenuous you're more likely to not receive a vote from the author. If however your vote has some value behind it, and even if not but you still voted it as a sign of approval, and you leave a meaningful comment or have a history of not just posting "short comments", the author may upvote your comment as a thanks or acknowledgement of having seen and read it if a reply isn't necessary.
With the way the Hive price is doing lately, though, most of the comment votes which naturally tend to wanna be smaller than votes you may leave on whole posts, tend to not give out a lot of rewards to the comment. I believe and hope that 
The issue with that however is that those who mainly rely on autovotes and don't care about their comment section that much to maybe even bother responding or curating the few comments they may receive - they'll make more author rewards since they're not forfeiting part of them to go to the comments using
It's still early days but if you've been following along so far, you may start to connect the dots that curators, especially manual ones, could affect the votes to favor those forfeiting part of their author rewards towards the comments.
Think of it this way:
If you're a curator and you see an author who constantly posts and by the looks of it most of the voting support is coming from what you believe to be autovotes. Then you see a post by an author who receives more diverse voters and rewards on their posts but also a lot more engagement and on top of it wants to reward their comments with part of the posts's rewards. Aren't you more likely to vote the latter compared to the former? and more importantly: Would you vote them a little extra than you usually would if you know a small % of the post rewards are going to the comments? This action would make up for the % they're forfeiting as they're now getting higher vote strength.
Anyway, I'm excited to see how this service may change engagement levels and how users are rewarded with more adoption of it. Hopefully mostly for the better.
PS. I will not be forfeiting part of this post's rewards to
Post Banner: upcoming 
