At the beginning of every month I do some stats regarding my activity on Steem and everything related.
For some time now (at least since 4 months ago) I discovered that my curation rewards have plummeted. I mean every month was worse than the month before. I now earn around 70% less curation rewards than four months ago.
Some reasons for this trend are entirely in my hands:
Other reasons have to do with the fact that other steemians are better curators than me (that includes accounts doing personalized bot curation) and/or have a lot more SP to give them a bigger slice of the pie.
So far I haven't reacted much to this decline in curation rewards, but lately I try to do a little more manual curation.
I will however not change anything radical till after HF21, because with it curation habits will likely change significantly for many active people.
I am aware I am not a great curator and I don't always have enough patience to curate, and that won't change much for me.
At this point I'm not sure what exactly I'll do after HF21.
I'd like to continue to upvote people who engage on my posts, but that may prove to be in vain, rewards-wise.
Should I follow a curation guild? Hmm, that's a tough one.
One of the latest proposals of change for HF21 refers to reducing the curation window from 15min to 1min.
While at 15min, you can set up SteemAuto to vote before 15min, knowing you will lose some of the curation reward, but also knowing you will be placed in a better position on the curators order, at 1min curation window SteemAuto will not be very helpful against personalized curation setups (not that it is now, but at least you can control your curation order better), because it will have all votes squeezed at min 1. This will also produce some random results (maybe this is good for newer members of curation trails?), as two votes set to go at min 1 can be casted in a different order, even if they are transmitted in a certain order.
At the same time, manual curation (including, very importantly, on comments!) would benefit from this proposed change.
Also with the new hardfork, many posts will be under the threshold (16 STU. I think it is) where the reward curve is supra-linear and will never reach that level. Should I curate them? Why? Will earning less curation for my stake, but also split between less curators be better or worse than splitting the curation rewards of a post that converged to linear with a lot more curators?
Most likely these questions and others will only find real answers when we see how the new changes work together and their effect on curation habits.
