RE: One Tip to Improve Your Curation Trail
You are dead on with your overview of vote trails. Most are not doing anything other then making the person running them a lot of curation money and worse more then a few are selling their services in one way or another.
When I set up the PIF curation Trail it will be set up will be with an account that is designed to have no SP, well at least no more then required to be able to cast 8 votes a week.
The idea will be to set a curation trail for the best of the best featured bloggers gaining a vote from the curation trail account. These will be from the winners of the Judges Choice awards and both featured bloggers will gain a vote from the trail as a bonus.
Even small votes from those who support this process will really help the plankton that will be receiving these votes. Just seeing a string of votes poor in for someone with a newer account will be serious motivation. Hopefully we will be able to secure a few larger accounts that will commit to 8 votes per week on a preset day for this trail.
Not there yet, but this is something I want to launch in the next week or two.
You are sure full of great ideas, @thedarkhorse. Thank you so much for weighing in. I hope to help the trails I'm on and the minnows that support them. Great idea with your "no sp" account. One of the ones I know of uses a small account, but big enough to have a slider in order to vote at 1% - which is zero value. Anyway that can be done is for the best.
I can't wait to see your curation trail in action. I know it will be just what we need here :)
I figure that by having no SP in the account I won't feel bad if it sits at 100% VP for 85% of the week and I'll know that it's giving all of the curation to those who follow it.
Key for people following a trail is to vote at 0 minutes after the curator if they are worried about curation rewards. If you are voting because you believe in the cause and want to help the small fish put a delay on your vote. Even delaying 5 minutes lets others get in first and earn curation rewards.
If 100 people are already in the trail you will never earn curation rewards if they are all at 0 minutes as steemauto takes the first registered 0 minute account and that is the first vote. Due to network lag (latency) and the votes being cast milliseconds apart sometimes there is variance to the exact order but they are cast in the same order each time. So finding a new trail (PIF...hint hint) and signing up early gives you a much better chance at earning some curation rewards.
Your chance also increases a lot if you vote at a higher power. See plenty of trail votes cast at 2.5% and the person has 20sp. That person isn't even casting a vote that is registered by steemit. Currently you need about 1.5sp for a vote to register, so 2.5% of 20sp is only 0.5sp vote which is not even registered. It's dusted away before it's even counted as a dust vote. This helps avoid the network getting clogged with zero value votes and keeps things running smoother for everyone.