Curation Takes The Lead

It's official.. curation rewards have officially taken over month over month for me for the last few months!

It's certainly not a bad situation to be in, in all honesty. One of the really interesting and good things about the Hive ecosystem is that we have a lot of different elements going on. One of the most important elements is curation rewards. It's a whole different paradigm when you think about it!

Curation rewards are, as we all know, when we get our 50/50 payment when a post pays out that we voted on. As you get more Hive Power staked to your account, your slice of the pie gets bigger. The more you vote on, the more curation rewards you are accumulating throughout the day. With the account growth I've seen over the last few years, one of the things that I've been keeping an eye on is the healthy increase in the curation rewards that are kicking back. It's really fascinating to watch!

For me, voting is an enjoyable thing. I am certainly not one to shy away from visiting new peoples posts, but I tend to be a little leery of that lately. I have been much more conservative with my voting power in that I only will be manually voting others that I know are doing a good job of keeping their Hive assets on chain and not just siphoning stuff out to an exchange to sell every penny they get.

This has been a recent change, starting about the end of the summer I would say. Since then, I've been dishing out way more 40, 50 and 75% votes than I ever really have since I started to have a decent stake in the platform years ago. I think it's kind of enjoyable to be able to do that, because as I've worked pretty hard for the stake I've got, I'm able to then turn around and pay that forward to the people who I like to interact with and curate their posts.

This has in turn led to increased curation rewards as my stake continues to grow. I am really proud of where it's at, but one of the things that's been noticeable is that it's now overtaken author rewards very consistently. This is a double edged sword for me. I am incredibly grateful of the rewards I am bringing in in terms of my posts, but there are certainly some days that are much better than others. Thankfully with curation rewards, you can let that just do it's magic and come in as the posts pay out. With having done a considerable amount of voting since I started on here, those returns are increasing and very regular. I am averaging 10 Hive Power per day now for curation rewards. There are some days where it's 9 but thankfully those are fewer and further between.

With the increase in curation rewards, that means that I am consistently and steadily adding to my staked Hive Power every single day through that mechanism alone. If I were to stop posting and just curating, I would be bringing in around 3,200 Hive Power in a year. That's not bad, considering it's voting and pretty passive! Granted I don't think that would happen anytime in the near future unless I get hit by a bus or something, which hopefully I don't lol.

The next interesting thing that's going to happen is when curation is 50% of my author rewards total. That is slowly but steadily increasing! It used to be 30% of my author rewards but it's closing the gap fast! It's about 40% right now, and getting smaller.

Overall, these changes have been very welcome to see roll through. I don't look at it all the time, but I do like to take a look at it once a month or so to just see how it's doing and where things are at. I think that's a healthy boundary and limit for me. I don't want to focus obsessively on the numbers, but I do want to grow at a good pace. Curation rewards help me grow at a better pace now than they did before which is nice!

What about you, do you take a look at your curation numbers? Are you excited about them growing? Let me know in the comments!