In when do whales upvote? I looked at the upvote patterns of a subset of whales to see which days and which times they tend to upvote.

Since writing that post I've been wondering how soon whales upvote after a post has been published. Are they focusing on curation rewards like most regular users, or are they more benevolent?

To answer the question I wrote a program in Python to plot the upvote times relative to the post's publication time for the period 03-09-2016 to 17-09-2016.

The founders

Since writing the last post I've discovered that @dan and @dantheman are the same person. It appears that @dan uses @dantheman a lot more, so only data for this account is shown.

@ned and @dantheman have very similar upvote patterns. The bulk of their upvotes are after the curation penalty cutoff and before the first payout - 30 minutes and 24 hours respectively.

In the largest window their upvotes are also distributed similarly, with more upvotes being placed in the 7 hours of a post's lifetime.

@ned and @dantheman are also the whales who upvote the most after the first payout. Sadly, this is only 8.47% and 6.98% of the total, respectively.

Whale bots

These are the same bot accounts as in the previous post, with the addition of the infamous @wang.

It's no surprise that these three bots, owned by the same whale, have very similar upvote timing. Additionally, the distribution is a lot flatter than the other whale accounts.

@wang is the outlier in the data set as the only whale that upvotes more during the first 30 minutes, especially the first 15 minutes, than at any other time. This means @wang forfeits its own curation reward, giving post authors an extra boost. @wang has one of the worst reputations on steemit, yet gives the most back in terms of curation reward.

Curation

@curie and @robinhoodwhale both exist to help lesser-known authors get recognition for their work. It's worth stressing that neither of these accounts are whales, but they are helped by whales. Sadly @curie doesn't have much data yet, probably because all the upvoting is done by proxy, but @robinhoodwhale is going strong.

Others

Here are the charts for the other whales. If you think other whales should be included in reports like this, please let me know.

These charts show a big difference in vote distribution, even though the share in terms of curation penalty and post payout are similar. While @berniesanders and @nextgencrypto's distributions gradually tale off as a post gets older, @blocktrades limits voting to between 30 minutes and 3 hours.

I know that @berniesanders and @nextgencrypto allocate voting power to other projects, such as @curie, so this might be an explanation.

The remaining charts from @complexring, @pharesim, @rainman, and @smooth show the same pattern where more upvotes occur between the curation penalty cutoff and the first payout. All four show a greater number of upvotes after the first payout than by other whales (excluding @dan and @ned), but compared to other timings, it's still a very small amount. @smooth differs every-so-slightly in that more upvotes are placed between 15 and 30 minutes.

Summary

Most whales upvote after the curation penalty cutoff, taking all curation rewards for the upvote. The only exception is @wang who upvotes before the penalty more often than not. Some whales like @smooth and @pharesim do have a large portion of votes between 15 and 30 minutes, but the majority for them is still after the penalty.

Perhaps the most striking pattern is how little whales upvote posts after the first payout. There are a few possible explanations:

1. After the first payout there's no curation reward - curators nothing for upvoting. This removes all incentive from upvoting after 24 hours;
2. If the post wasn't good enough to vote in the first payout cycle, why would it get upvoted in the second?
3. Posts after a certain time are no longer easy to find due to newer posts.

Whatever the reason, it makes me wonder what the purpose of the second payout is if the whales themselves seldom upvote after 24 hours. I can imagine that the same pattern will be found in most accounts on steemit.

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