I have a new test account on steem, and haven't decided what I'll do with it yet. So, for now and since its creation, I used it to follow two popular and seemingly rewarding curation trails.
But, first things first. The account is 10 days old now and I haven't funded it beyond the initial amount and the delegation received from Steemit.
At 15 SP and the current Steem prices, a full vote with a new account such as this is evaluated at roughly 0.002$. Of course it doesn't make a splash, what would you expect?
My first few votes with the account were manual, until I set up the bot to follow the two curation trails. I also casted three-four votes manually a few days later, when apparently the bot wasn't working for some reason.
Other than that, I instructed the bot to upvote immediately after the curator with a fixed voting power weight, which means that it upvotes at a fixed weight using the test account, regardless of the weight the curator uses. I did that because I realized a fraction of the test account's upvote is worth exactly nothing. However, about half the time I used a 100% weight and the other half 50%, for more daily votes.
The bot starts working if the voting power is higher than 96%.
The results after 10 days are exactly ZERO curation rewards.
Yes, I know it's a 7-day delay, but there are still the first 3 days which should have shown some progress, if one would be there.
Would I have been more efficient as a manual curator? Maybe a bit, because these curators are over-trailed and probably everyone has set up the upvotes to go immediately after the curator's.
Despite my inclination to create content, I have to wonder if curation-only, at least for the newbies, is really a way on steem right now? And that, of course, affects undiscovered quality content.
I'll continue the experiment. I've just delegated 30 SP to the test account and we'll see if that makes any difference.