Understanding the Curation system on the steem blockchain

The Curation system is one of the very pivotal and valuable aspects of the steem blockchain. The steem blockchain is comprised of four valuable participants including Content creators, developers, witnesses, and curators. The system is designed in a way that all the participants can earn from their active contributions to the steem chain. Note that anyone can participate in all those four valuable categories.

Animation: source

There is a technical concept and system called the reward pool. Every day the system generates a certain amount of tokens that are distributed to the participants on the blockchain. I am going to focus on the curators' side. These are involved in the daily distribution of the steem tokens to the content creators through curating or voting on their content. 50% of the rewards on every article that has been curated or voted on by any steem-user are paid out to the curators of that content. In other words, the author receives 50% and the curators also share the other 50% on that article.

As you go on curating on content at 100% voting power your voting Mana keeps reducing and that reduces on the total amount of rewards you can allocate to the authors’ content and also reduces the curation rewards that are paid out to you. According to @cryptokannon in her article here, Your voting mana reloads on a daily percentage of 20%.
Voting in steemit can either be an Up-vote or a down-vote. Note that you can only earn curation rewards through up-votes rather than down-votes.

If you want to increase on the curation rewards that you can earn on curating, you will need to increase it by purchasing some steem from the exchanges like poloniex which you eventually power up on steemit. The other option is growing your steem power with time through earning on quality content creation. You can as well be delegated some steem power by some generous people on the platform which also can increase on your curation rewards. For example, I have a total delegation of about 1500sp.