This morning, I was talking to a fellow steemians about Bid bots, where he brought up an important point about curation reward and how to fix it. His solution is more elaborate and requires lot of changes to the system, but that got me thinking more about curation rewards.
By definition:
Curation rewards exist to incentivize readers to seek out quality new content and to promote it with their upvotes. A proportion of the rewards from each post is reserved to pay for this curation. The currently split of rewards is 75% of the post payout for authors and 25% for curators. The overall curation payments are thus higher for more successful posts, rewarding curators who find quality content.
So it is a reward which should be awarded to real people when they find good content but what if you are buying a vote. Who should really get reward in that case. Since you are the curator of your own content, you should be the one making that reward.
This is a big problem. Big enough that it can't be ignored. So should we stop using bid-bots altogether?
Given that centerpiece of my readership is bid-bots, of-course I won't ask you to abandon them. I also believe that Code is Law, so if something is allowed by the system, its fare game. So I will give you a solution which works in the confines of the system.
To lay out my solution, first let me lay out some ground work.....
- Currently, the way system is designed, majority of the curation rewards goes to first 5 curators.
- If someone up-votes a post in first 30 min. then author gets part of curation.
So that means if someone up-votes as soon as you post, you get 100% of curation and if they do it at 15 min., you get 50% of their curation.
Now we will use these two point to drive our strategy.
When you post your content. Buy 5 up-votes from bid bots in first 10 min. Even if you get them at 0% ROI. These don't need to be big votes. They can be reasonably sized votes like 25-50 SBD each. This is all you need to get max ROI. After that you can up-vote your post all you want and even if you make 0% after curation from up-vote bot. You will end up making huge profits because you are getting major portion of curation rewards for curating your post.
Results from last 2 payouts (I was still figuring out details back then) :
This one is 10.3% curation
This one is 12.73% curation
Hope this makes sense. Ask questions in the comment below if it doesn't.