How To Maximize Your Comment Curation Rewards With $rewarding

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After Hard Fork 20, a change was made in regard to what happens to the curation rewards when a voter votes within the reverse auction period after a post or a comment has been published. (In case you don't know, the reverse auction period was 0 to 30 minutes after a post was published. Now it is 0 to 15 minutes. There was and still is a penalty for early upvoting the percentage of which depends linearly on the timing of your upvote.)

Now, the rule change that I'm talking about is that the rewards you lose no longer go the author but back to the reward pool. Before Hard Fork 20 last October, I never cared about how new a post or comment was when I upvoted it because losing part of my curation rewards meant giving the lost portion to the author, which I was fully ok with because rewarding them was the reason for upvoting them in the first place.

But now I'm loathe to have my curation rewards to go completely to waste. I have noticed that many of the users that I interact with regularly feel the same. You can stick around and time your upvotes to maximize your rewards or you can make a mental note to come back after a while and upvote your interlocutor's comments in a batch. The latter method seems to employed by @tarazkp. But doing so is sub-optimal because it introduces an unnecessary cognitive load. And you might often forget to do so, which is wasteful because the reward system is all about monetizing attention. In my opinion, if a conversation is worth having and putting some thought into, then it should be worth upvoting, too.

Fortunately, there is a solution to the dilemma. Months ago, @holger80 implemented @rewarding, a bot that you can give your posting authority using SteemConnect that you can direct with a simple command specifying vote weight and vote timing in a comment to a post or comment you want to give a delayed upvote to. See this post by @holger80 for instructions as to how to use the bot.

Another thing I'd like to remind some people of who autovote me is that it would be a good idea to check the timing of your autovotes. Auto-upvoting much later than 15 minutes after I publish a post is wasteful in terms of your curation rewards because curation rewards depend on the order in which the upvotes arrive. For optimal results, you should time your upvote between 11 and 15 minutes. Timing it after 15 minutes is a straightforward mistake because there is no penalty for early upvotes after 15 minutes but it will cause you to lose out on curation rewards because most users will vote before you do. Timing it slightly before 15 minutes may be a good idea many of my posts get a lot of upvotes after 10 minutes.

Hope this helps.