#2 Witness Proves That Manual Curation Is Back!

I published an article at 10 AM yesterday, where I talked about rewards and how rewards are more than just money. What many of us have realized since HF21 is that content is approximately 4-6 minutes old before others are starting to upvote it, and this is what happened yesterday as well.

I have also started to see people writing about how you can attract whales and there are users out there sharing tips of things you can do to increase your chances to get large upvotes. This reminds me of the old days, and I actually enjoy many of these posts because they are usually filled with positivity.

A few hours after I had published my article I noticed a post like that, and I wrote a comment:

"Luck is one of the ingredients, especially as most votes are handed out during the first 5 minutes after an article has been published. You are not very likely to receive upvotes from any large accounts after those 5 minutes as they will earn less curation rewards, but it can happen."

"Something I would add is actually more of a "don't do"-thing. If you put an "@" before a username, they will be notified, and if you are doing this regularly and if you mass-mention people in an attempt to get recognition, you are likely to be downvoted, muted or completely ignored."

I will obviously take my own advice and not highlight a bunch of different users, because it doesn't look good. I usually mention people when or if I really need their attention or during the time I ran the "push people"-initiative for instance, as I wanted others to get a quick-link to all the users involved in the project. More than that usually looks like "vote-fishing" and I don't recommend that approach to anyone.

However, the part I wrote about curation rewards and about the time you will receive upvotes, is written due to how I personally think that HF21 have changed our general approach and mindset regarding upvotes. I would say that most people have changed their voting-habits after HF21, and I would also say that most people are likely to ignore older content as they will earn more curation rewards by upvoting content early.

My Article Was 16 Hours Old...

When my article had been alive for 16 hours, I noticed something really cool. The #2 witness, yabapmatt, gave me a 100% upvote.

It was really exciting to see this upvote. Not only because the potential payout increased, but because it showed that he is willing to upvote older content, regardless of the potential payout.

I am not sure if he was able to find my article because of any of the resteems I had or if he found it by himself, by browsing all the content, but that doesn't matter. The thing that matters is that he didn't seem to care about the age of the post. He thought the content was interesting, good, of high quality or for any other reason, he found the content worthy of an upvote and he decided to reward it.

I think this is extremely important for several reasons, and I am super-thrilled to see that the #2 witness does something like this. This is true encouragement. Actions like this will fill people with hope and motivation. This will ultimately encourage people to put in that little bit of extra time in their efforts, and it will fill Steem with more high quality content.

That being said, I know that there are others out there doing this as well, and I often get upvotes after the "5-minute rule", but I wasn't expecting a 100% upvote from the #2 witness. I hope that many, many others will (start to) reward "old" content in an attempt to encourage and motivate our fellow Steemians. I hope this is the real goal and intentions with #newsteem.