Looks like @Xeldal has you on a 4 minute auto-voter, which means everything you post Trends automatically. That's a bit weird.
EDIT: I managed to luck out and find this post within 2 minutes of you submitting it. I started to read immediately. 4 minutes later I was done, gave it a 100% upvote, and found I had already been beaten by Xeldal's voting block.
The way curation works, those who vote later give most of the rewards to those who voted earlier. But those people aren't even reading what you've typed, they're just auto-voting for the guaranteed rewards.
This encourages daily posting, but not necessarily quality.
I'll keep that in mind.
Apparently somewhere around 4-5 minutes (after posting) is the "sweet spot" to maximize curation reward on posts.
testing it out. Thanks.
Stupid curation curves and payout penalties for posts are the reason. 50/50 split have to be real 50/50. Right now almost everyone is autovoting and joins curation trails or other kind of circles. People wants to get their 50% back, nobody cares for manual curation
This is the primary reason I oppose curation rewards. Upvoting has nothing to do when it's simply seeking financial returns. Actual curation would be useful, but that makes the rewards counter-productive, because they discourage actually reading content and ascertaining if it's good, as you point out.
At least @krnel is getting @xeldal's upvotes. His content is consistently high quality IMHO.
I hear ya. Whether people manually vote or not, my posts will get flagged up to about -$67 from two main sources. I'll have about $2 left here after 2nd round of flags from alleged "curangel" group who doesn't care to leave me with $0 when many votes are indeed manual.