Setting up your own curation trail is not that difficult, all you really need to get started is a couple of hundred HP and a bunch of accounts you want to autovote.
There are several established curation trails on Hive that you can delegate to, but like any businesses they are designed to minimize input and maximize returns. And that is fair enough, that is how all successful businesses work, but if you set up your own trail you can have similar returns and actually support the content you want to see, rather than funding a bunch of crap you are not even interested in.
There are two main issues I have with big curation accounts:
Curation as censorship
Some curation accounts are using their big delegations to selectively downvote content that their owners disapprove of. They are driving some content creators off the platform, and in doing so effectively censoring the content that is seen on Hive.
The particular account that first brought this to my attention was Max Igan, (@maxigan) who is posting some really good content, and has a huge number of fans who want to watch his videos. He is being censored on other platforms, and it was a perfect opportunity to onboard his followers to Hive. But accounts like Curangel were giving his posts big downvotes and wiping out his payouts.
I immediately pulled my delegation to Curangel because of that.
Curation as a means to decide what content is encouraged.
Curation accounts are tending to reward certain types of content, rather than identifying content of high quality. So for example, they may upvote second rate crap just because it is posted by a new account, while totally ignoring long established accounts that post good content week in and week out, but are shunned by the big upvoting accounts because they are not in agreement with some deep set underlying agendas.
Or in some cases they are subtly promoting their own interests, so over-reward any content that is essentially just good PR, while ignoring in many cases far better content that rips holes in the latest bullshit they are promoting.
If I sound bitter and twisted here, it is because I’ve seen this happen, and go unnoticed, far too often over the past 4½ years.
Setting up my own curation trail.
So my response to all this was to set up my own curation account, @gimp.
The @gimp account was never intended to be an account for sharing much of my own content, but to see how it might work to set up my own curation trail.
I started out by following all the people I follow on my other accounts. So straight away, that meant I was starting out with over 2000 follows. But my old follow lists were from Steemit and went back a long time, so most of those accounts have never posted on Hive. That's OK though, if any of them come back I'll see them come up in my feed. And about 300 of them are active, so I have set all those active accounts an autovote.
My @gimp feed is pretty cool and includes a bunch of content I would have otherwise missed. It’s sort of like having a “latest post” feed, but with good content rather than the utter crap you see on the real Hive latest post feed. While I originally intended it to be all about autovoting, the feed is interesting enough that sometimes I look through it and follow new people from my frot account. Check it out here: @gimp/feed
Setting up auto-votes
To set up auto-votes I use Hivevote: https://hive.vote
I fine tune the amount to vote so that my vote mana stays around 80%, by adjusting the vote power as needed. At the moment it’s set at 8% and I’ve also been doing some manual voting which has run it down a bit.
So that is vote weight 8%, and the other settings I use are time delay 5 mins, weekly limit 14 posts, and daily limit 2 posts.
That is following 300 accounts (quite a lot), while for say 50 accounts (much easier to manage) the vote weight would be more like 45%.
The votes are not really worth all that much because I only have 20,000 HP delegated at the moment, but it’s a bit of a test and will be increasing over the next month or so.
What are my returns like?
They usually range from about 12 to 14% depending on if the voting power is being run down or built up. And they look low after I increase the delegation. But it’s not a business, and I just keep an eye on these things for my own entertainment. (Today's 12.8 is fairly low, and it has been up over 15% on occasion).
You can see the returns on your accounts here: https://hivestats.io/@gimp
(just replace "gimp" with your own account name)
If the value of Hive continues to rise, all votes will be worth more, and as the amount delegated to @gimp increases the voting value will go up as well. But adding more accounts to autovote will drop the vote value.
What sort of content am I looking for?
Creativity, colour, originality, humour, thinking, understanding, expression – so cool shit rather than boring as fuck nerd crap.
Comment below or follow @gimp if you have what it takes to float some boats!
