On HF 20 - Upvoting As Soon As A Post Is Published Is Costing You Valuable Curation Rewards - Stop Throwing Them Away!

I know that a lot of you have either forgotten, or have never heard about this important feature of the long awaited Hard Fork 20 that is costing you money on a daily basis. Seeing many of you still upvoting your posts as soon as you publish them and all of the trail votes I get in the first minutes of publishing a post, hurts to observe. I dislike seeing people throw money away. Even though it's going back to the reward pool, I would still rather like you to get those rewards rather than everyone else. You worked hard, or invested to get where you are now and you deserve to retain as much of the curation rewards as you can.

Let's look into the changes to better understand them and find the best way to go about upvoting now, when HF 20 has finally been implemented.

Hardfork 20 (“Velocity”) development update

If authors vote for themselves right away, they get their author rewards, 100% of the curation rewards from their vote, plus a portion of the curation rewards coming from everyone who votes for the post after them. Any other curator voting at the same time as the author would get 0% of the curation rewards. This gives the author an unfair advantage over other curators because the author can earn additional curation rewards through self-voting.
In order to eliminate this unfair advantage, the unused portion of the curation rewards will be returned to the rewards pool instead of being awarded to the author, thereby increasing the overall percentage of rewards that will be paid to curators. This will better serve the original mission of the curation rewards budget: to ensure that the Steem blockchain distributes rewards to the most valuable content.

A reasonable change. The advantage authors had over others was unfair and had to be removed. Now that it is, the ones who still upvote themselves straight away, are to be thanked because they are filling up the reward pool for everyone.

The other major adjustment to curation was cutting the 30 min curation window in half.

As of now, Steem account holders (including bot accounts) are disincentivized by the Steem blockchain from voting on a post within the first 30 minutes. The earlier a vote is made within the initial 30-minute window, the less curation rewards the voting account receives. This was originally introduced to even the playing field between human curators and bots. This was successful but with the rise of more short-form content on the platform (content that can be read or viewed in less than 30 minutes), the community and the witnesses have come to a consensus that the 30-minute rule is taking curation rewards away from human voters who are actively consuming content and voting on material they like. For this reason, HF20 will reduce this window from 30 to 15 minutes.

A logical step forward. The content on Steem really is going towards the shorter spectrum. Halvinig the 30-minute window to 15 minutes seems like a good decision. Now we just need to adjust our curation patterns, set our trails time intervals accordingly and finally, stop wasting curation rewards.

When to upvote then?

The answer is simple. 15 min. When you see that a post is at the 15 min mark, then you know it is the right time to splash it with your portion of the reward pool. Every upvote before this sweet spot has a diminishing return on curation rewards, that is increasing the closer it is to the time of posting the article. At 15 mins though, the diminishing return diminishes and we are free to upvote, without losing any curation rewards.

It doesn't matter if you are curating others, or just self-voting. In order to maximise your curation rewards, it's best to upvote at the magic number 15.

Hope you found this article helpful, and that you will take my advice to increase your curation rewards in the future!

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