What do you mean by "By curating manually, you can just barely reach to break-even."
To break even with what?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that (at least when one's HP reaches orca territory) that the curation in absolute terms is still fairly large, even if it could be much better with "curation sniping".
Everyone likes to accuse us of maximizing curation rewards but facts are different. They are normally talking about APR or average efficiency according to effective HP, so accordingly efficiency applies the same way on Orca or Whale.
Consider these facts from Hivestats as an example:
100% efficiency means you are not losing or gaining anything according to your effective SP. Less than 100 means you are losing something.
To achieve more than 100, it is only possible via curation sniping(automated votes within first 3-4 minutes).
Its easier to gain more efficiency by choosing popular authors and it takes considerably less effort than voting manually. By choosing to do curation sniping, you can just sit back, relax and criticize all day long.
thanks for pointing this out, but I still don't quite get it 😅 (which is a bit embarrassing for being here for almost 3 years)...
"100% efficiency means you are not losing or gaining anything according to your effective SP."
I assume this refers to the inflation that we are all subjected to? If my APR is under 100%, then my staked HP loses voting power as the inflation is higher than the growth of my stake? Is this correct?
If so, then this isn't necessarily so problematic as:
I might still earn that difference in form of author rewards, growing my stake (if powered up)
If you are an orca or whale it just means that your voting power will decrease perhaps by as much as 4% annually (see the quote from @grampo). But in absolute terms you are still making tons of Hive (even in 5 years (which would then be about 17% less, in fact this decrease gets slower as the years go by)). Granted, you have to be an orca or higher for this not to bother you...
In fact, I think especially the last point (if correct) should be a huge motivation for large stakeholders to vote more freely. Of course there is the human need for more (greed) which mitigates this, but still; speaking for myself, if I ever reach 100k, I wouldn't be bothered by this so much (I hope ;)
If this analysis is correct, then the biggest problem from this would be that it starkly favors larger stakeholders as especially newcommers would have to maximize their APR to "catch up". Something that should be addressed, otherwise Hive is likely never able to retain its users. Although this problem is limited to the curation side of things.
Its an estimate of upcoming pending rewards of one week and does not refer to inflation
All the people who are mostly criticizing are whales and you might see the same people spreading misinformation intentionally. It does not bother me at all and it reminds me of this quote:
You're comparing your efficiency with one of the most efficient curators on Hive, and even 96% is extremely efficient. You're only able to achieve that level since you're voting on fresh content; aka content where no other stakeholders have voted on before. I'm open to being proven wrong tho'.
And by the way, I'm obviously following curation trails. Who has time to manually curate while losing out massively vs auto-voters? Unless of course, you set up your own community and vote on fresh content.
I already stated the 'why' of it earlier and I don't need to prove anything wrong. Thanks.