Curation Vs Self Voting - Which one is more profitable?
Recently I have seen many accounts dedicating their steem power on curation. Some people using curation bots and some are doing it manually. Curation is basically the reward for finding undervalued posts and promoting those by upvoting.
Self voting on the other hand is quite self explanatory. I see many people don’t like self voters for obvious reasons. There are ongoing debates whether to self vote or curate and which one is more profitable.
In this post I am trying to find out the financial benefit of curation vs self voting by following some curators. I have listed few curators with high steem power, some of them are even curation bots. I have used steemnow.com to find out how much their vote worth with 100% voting power. We know that after HF19 we can cast 10 upvotes with 100% power each day. For example, if someone’s vote is worth $1, he/she can earn $10 daily just by selfvoting their own post.
Examples 1
Let's move into the examples I was talking earlier. I am showing 2 curators below who might be making lot more by selfvoting other than curation. The list can go on and on.
Above picture we can see the user's single vote worth approximately $98. So 10 self votes per day will make him $980 daily. Yet, the account is making 70-80 steem power daily which is equivalent to around $120 at today's price.
Examples 2
Here is the 2nd example of another user who's single vote worth $21 and daily potential earnings could me $210 using self vote. But this account is also earning 70-80 steem power daily which is equivalent to around $120 at today's price.
An I missing something here?
Curating other posts is always good idea you have chances of getting votes from other people. It also has long term benefits. If you curate minnow posts then he will grow, recognize good content and curate. I am following the above.
Hi @krishatnet, of course curating others post is the best practice from ethical point of view. But I have mentioned on my post the analysis is based on completely financial point of view. Also I wanted to know if I am missing something on my calculation, because there should not be such a large gap between rewards. Thanks
Strictly from a dollar-and-cents point of view, curation will be more profitable if and only if the content that you curate gets a lot of other votes after yours.
One issue here is the approximately 80% cut (50% nominal cut, plus a larger cut due to the 'reverse auction') that was made to curation rewards earlier on, a cut that I opposed. Instead of curation and content being equal in value (a balance that would make earning the same or greater amount via curation much easier, though still not guaranteed), content is heavily favored.
In slashing curation to almost nothing, it made other 'alternative uses' for votes more attractive. Previously those alternative uses were things like whales hiring or partnering with writers, voting for them, and getting a lot of the rewards back under the table. Now that non-whale votes have real value, it includes (non-whale) self-voting as well.
The underlying problem is that real curation has insufficient incentives (in large part due to the 80% cut).
Still, in cases where you can recognize good content early, you can probably make more with curation, but the way the reward share has been set up, the system is unfortunately working against this sort of desired behavior.
They are not throwing money away. They aren't selfish and thats a good thing. You shouldn't be here for the money but for the fun and knowledge.
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I find that I make almost as much money upvoting other people's posts as I do upvoting my own. If you're the biggest fish upvoting a particular post, you usually end up with the lion's share of the curation rewards.
The great thing about Steemit is that you can actually help others while you help yourself.
Hi @talanhorne, I agree with you that curation is the best way to help others at the same time gaining the reward share. Are you sure you are earning the same curating as you would by self voting? Thanks
Now this might be why people don't like self voters. If they are the giant and they self vote. Then they take the lions share. The others who vote then don't get as much as normally so it almost penalizes your supporters. Interesting. Very Interesting. Thanks for sharing.
Completely agree. you can help everyone out on steem.
Yes, that analysis needs to be done to compare to this one. Find someone who votes for only a few of their own posts and mostly on other posts and see what that says. This post only checked one option of many ways to slice and dice your votes.
Would it be possible for steemit to make it so you made the same payout for both selfvote and curate?
Nice post :)
We need to change balance of author and curation rewards from 75/25 to 50/50. I think it will solve the problem, won't it?
I see nothing wrong in keeping it half and half at this point in time. My power is pretty low. If I spend half my power increasing my own, it will reward the other posts I upvote more. Win-win in my eyes.
Self vote is more profitable. Curation profitable only when after you more and more voters vote that post.
My dear cut baby, you have to kept the money for your future or let me catch the money. As a new steemian I need lots of Steem Power. Thanks @codebreaker