A potentially touchy subject in light of recent discussions, but there's plenty of data and I think some positive outcomes to focus on with regards to curation rewards.
The discussion is mostly based around the chart above which uses the previous 10 weeks of numbers from the Curation Leagues top 100 earners, as seen most recently here.
I'm using the number calculated by dividing weekly curation earnings by total Steem Power held, and then multiplying that by 1000 to get the SP earned per 1000 SP staked.
e.g. If you have 1500 SP vested and earn 3 SP a week in curation rewards, your weekly earnings per 1000 SP vested is 2 SP.
The number has been calculated for each of the top 100 over 10 weeks, and a couple of math formulas have been applied to produce the chart.
In the chart there are just over 6 weeks of earnings tallied prior to the (first) hard fork on the 27th August. During this time, as you would expect, there is little movement in the average earnings - pretty flat at around 2 SP per 1000 SP staked. The low 20 average remained pretty close to 1 SP per week, but did tick up a little to 1.18 the week prior to the fork, and the top 20 average also remained quite steady, finishing up at 3.57 on the 25th August.
The weekly results following the 27th (in which we had around 5 days worth of collection under the new 'rules'), curation rewards ticked up across the board. This was generally expected due to the author/curator split moving from 75/25 to 50/50, but what else does the chart show?
Not long after I started the curation league, it was clear that those heading the list were using a combination of auto-votes and, either manually or programmatically, front-running bid-bots. The former I'm not against as long as it's not whole stake going to the same 10 accounts each day, and I repent my auto-voting sins by trailing @c-cubed and delegating to @curangel, just so some stake goes out to content and authors I could never reach.
The front running of bid-bots though I've never particularly liked. For almost two years, this is where the best curation rewards have been acquired, completely stuffing up any proof of brain and desire to curate and hunt for under-valued content which could gain traction and votes, earning the early supporters a nice reward.
However, this has now changed somewhat with the new 'rules', particularly the introduction of 2.5 free downvotes and I think the chart above represents this in a couple of ways. I mentioned above that scores ticked up immediately following the fork, the low 20 average moving to over 1.5, and the upper 20 average to almost 5 SP per 1000 owned - and then what happened? The low 20 average has continued to rise, but perhaps more notably, the top 20 average has fallen and is now lower than pre-fork totals, even with curators receiving double from content payouts.
The results on the 2nd September were the last week where unfavorable voting was economically much (4x Traf/Kevin?) more viable than favorable voting. In the weeks that have followed, those front running the bots, or placing a vote on content they knew (with 20+ months of data showing this) would pick up the same large votes, have been losing out on their rewards, whilst the general population have been earning more.
The top 100 average is up almost 42% from the week prior to the fork to yesterday, but even more impressive is the low 20 average - up 56% between the same dates. And if we look at the top 20 average and low 20 averages on the 25th August and 15th September, the difference is now 72% from 280%.
I think that's a pretty good result - there are plenty of manual curators in the lower 20 average range now earning more SP each week, while those voting indifferently are, at least at present, earning a little less. Promising signs.
Cheers
Asher
Well put together analysis. Good food for thought. Glad to see things are working.
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Thanks man 😎
This is highly interesting as it seems to tell that the randomization has returned and it has become more unpredictable. However, it also shows that there is at least for now some return to PoB as the low end (the non/less autos) are finding content that is getting rewarded, not downvoted. Definitely metrics to keep an eye upon.
Front running bid bots is less frequent than before simply because bid bot use is down. That puts more rewards on the table for other voters.
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It is down because of the heavy downvoting that has taken place. THis is part of the randomization. There have also been some noteable circles that have changed behavior too, due to the downvoting. The more on the table isn't by accident :)
Thanks for adding this comment that should have been in my conclusion :)
It would be nice to see those averages move even closer together but the early signs look good.
This is promising indeed. The best weapon against front running content agnostic bid bots is mercilessly downvoting content promoted with bid bots to reward values not matching content value. That type of activity simply has to have negative ROI.
That said content quality and rewards do have a positive correlation. But delegating some stake to @curangel or others like it is recommended to anyone who has no time to dig up new and valuable content regularly.
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Yes I agree, and that has happened - perhaps more than many people expected as the bidders have taken a fair hammering at times (maybe even overly harshly in some places).
Hoping to steadily increase the delegation to @curangel - the reach of a curation group is far greater than even the keenest content hunters and finding these newer, low rewarded authors is what will grow the network out. Cheers :)
The times they are a changin!!! :0D
Seems so! A rather weak conclusion above, i need to included PoB, lottery, and randomisation in there somewhere - maybe a more skilled linguist can help :)
With a skilled linguist there are no heights we cannot achieve. Think of the word bingos to be had!!
Are you up and posting this early because you are heading to work!
:D
Actually hacked this one together yesterday evening and added the finishing touches this morning - the comments may give me something to do at work!
Hopefully they don't peak too early and your aren't left with actual work to do :0D
I wouldn't be against some actual work, staying awake whilst reading policy documents is becoming trickier by the day!
It won't be long before you are baw deep in the work and these days will be the halcyon ones :0)
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It is a good trend for everything to be coming closer... Hopefully it is something that applies across the ecosystem. Your curation league is a biased set I think, as it is an opt in and most of the people participating were not so much of the system gaming variety?
It is a subset of the community, but there are a fair few that joined only for the CL. I’ve looked at many of the top performers there in the past, and it’s not pretty :)
I think I will just live in ignorance... it's all rainbows and unicorns in my little part of STEEM.
This was very good to read... I go look more this info :) Thnax you put this up :)
Thanks :)
:))
I use to be 100% all manual curation. After the HF I switched over to auto voting for a sizeable chunk of it. I simply can't read nor will be around in the first 5 minutes. It really did not mean much in the past when I would be days later reading and voting on something. Now there is that incentive to get a vote down. I simply will move votes around and adjust now as needed.
I still leave myself some VP but those posts I tend to show up after it already got the votes. I just don't read or want spend 24/7 on a site when I could be doing so much more elsewhere.
Kind of of sad I had to go that route but I suspect I earn more now due to it.
Fair enough I think. Having some stake spare for trails and manual votes to make the outgoing vote pie look pretty is good enough.
The whole curation thing is still scammy in my opinion amd leads people to voting things they normally wouldn't consider quality. It has improved after HF21 and the demise of the bots, but it still doesn't feel quite right in my opinion.
I think there will always be some stake going to friends, family, acquaintances, self(alts), rubbish, but recently this is much improved. Slowly slowly :)
Slow and steady wins the race, lol. Actually, I have never had any issue with peopletrying to game curation, but HF21 may make this more relevant. I'm trying to spread my votes around a lot more.
Randomness will help continue the benefits as they will be less likely to be gamed in my opinion which then makes a better case for manual curation. May be intertwining as well as some will figure out ways to optimize.
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It all sounds promising! Can we get those two numbers just a little bit closer together?
I have to admit, I am not unhappy to see those bidbots go. I never used one, but now feel a little cheated with the small rep.
Hey! All this fun and money too? How can anyone go wrong? Do you need a part time job to fill in the down time at work?
!tip
I’m not sure the numbers will get too much closer but I will check on that at some point.
67 is an honourable rep, don’t worry!
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Not too worried. It would be nice to be bigger, but, in time. I have filed paperwork to get more busy stuff for you to do during the day.
No worries. Boredom will be the least of your problems. :)
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Question. Some are using bid-Bots but declining rewards. Do they still get downvoted? Where do the rewards go? What do the people receive who upvoted the posts?
Overall, I like this trend. There's still an incentive to compete over curation rewards but the gap is narrowing so those who are not actively front running bots or doing it manually are not completely left in the dust.
I think if profit maximizing curation (even if it's profit maximizing curation, it's still far better than vote selling, circle jerking, and arguably not a bad thing at all) is performing around 70% of voting rewardings, then with the free downvotes hovering aorund you're likely better curating than vote selling.
The trend is positive, I’m not sure how much closer the high and low averages will get though - this could be about it.
I’m not against trying to curate for a little extra steem if you were likely to vote the producer anyway because of consistent, interesting content. If the content becomes over-rewarded or uninteresting then perhaps CR will lower due to downvotes / the vote should be moved.