Your vote size (and associated curation reward) is increased when you place it on a post that does well (earns a big payout). This is the conclusion arrived at after a short experiment I conducted with some help from the Blurt community.
A few days ago, we asked...
"Are votes (and curation rewards) bigger when they're on popular content, as opposed to content that doesn't get many other votes?"
To test this, I made 2 comments and asked my readers to vote on one of them. The plan was to see if a vote on the comment with lots of votes was bigger than a vote on the comment with few votes.
Results
15 other users participated - thank you! A total of 444.36 BLURT (at time of writing) was allocated to the test comment. The value of my vote fluctuated over time. Several users left their own comments, letting me know what my vote value was, after they had added theirs.
After 3 voters, my vote was at 53.761 BLURT. After the 4th vote, it was 53.801, and after the 6th it was 54.371. After a couple more decent votes it sat at 55.115. Then MK and his associated accounts added a juicy 100% vote, sending it above 59. Several more votes brought it to about 61 BLURT.
It was clear that votes ARE influenced by other votes - they get bigger in groups! The remaining question is "by how much?"
It has been at least 24 hours since the last vote, so a good time to end the experiment. My vote's value has dropped now to 58.926 BLURT.
How about the control vote, on another comment? It was at about 53 BLURT at the start, but has also drifted lower:
What matters to us is the difference between them. Currently 52.115, which makes it 13% smaller than the vote on the "popular" comment.
So, in this case, it would be 13% more lucrative (for the creator, and for you) to vote on the content receiving a lot of other votes.
Comments
First, let's be clear that money isn't everything! It's always best to curate based on what you feel is quality, original, and useful content. If you're voting solely to profit, you're doing it wrong. Some don't even pay ANY attention to that side of things, and that's their right. So this information isn't useful for everyone. However, I do find it useful to understand how things work.
The results show the more total payout on a particular piece of content (post or comment), the more YOUR vote is going to be worth. In other words, by itself it's worth a certain amount. But with backup, it's worth even more!
Since comments rarely do as well as posts, this means posts tend to be better to vote on, if you're really trying to maximize the effect of your click.
It also means that popular content is better to vote on. I guess trying to throw a bone to the underdog isn't a great strategy for curators concerned about efficiency. Scanning the "trending" and "hot" pages for quality posts might be a good tactic for these users.
Why is it set up this way?
I think the reasoning for this - how it helps the blockchain - is that it encourages thoughtful (quality) manual curation. Bots that vote on all content, or users who vote on almost everything they come across, are not considered high-quality curators. Curation is about finding top-notch content, so it can be promoted and seen by more users, increasing the value of the platform. So you get a slight incentive to try and vote on stuff that other people are also going to vote on. You can vote on random comments nobody else is curating (or even reading) if you want, but your vote doesn't get a boost.
One topic for a potential future experiment is trying to find out if it matters what order the votes come in? Does voting early (for example, right at 5 minutes after posting) inflate your vote size?
13% (give or take) is a significant bonus for voting on popular content. But we should let our hearts and minds guide us to quality manual curation, not put financial considerations first. There's nothing wrong with scrolling through "hot" and "trending" to see if there's anything really good that you've missed. But we should always be looking for that hidden gem that deserves recongition, and vote on it even if that's going to be the only vote it gets.
DRutter
Interesting experiment. Hopefully it stimulates more good content because I'm having trouble finding much to vote or comment on.
I don't understand how the votes can even change as when you vote that vote has a given amount of Blurt. how that can be changed from other votes seems wrong. Confused I am🤨
I think there are multiple ways a vote's value can change in the 7 day period between creation and payout. Some are:
The FAQ may offer some clues in the section "Why do the earnings for my post go up or down?":
"The amount that is shown next to a post is a Potential Payout in BLURT. This is an estimated value of how much BLURT the post will make based on the votes that have occurred so far and the economic factors such as the reward pool and recent claims. Note that these are not USD estimates and hence should not fluctuate very much unless some voting activity has taken place. Depending on various factors, this value can go up or down until the payout window closes:
If a post receives more upvotes, the potential payout of the post can go up.
If other posts receive more upvotes, the potential payout of the post can go down very slightly.
If upvotes are removed from a post, the potential payout of the post can go down.
It is important to understand that global economic changes, such as voting activity increasing or decreasing across the Blurt chain, will have a small effect during the 7-day voting period on an individual post; the largest effect is from the votes on the post itself."
Thanks for that.
Although there is no tool on Blurt that measures the effectiveness of my vote, I analyze my effectiveness on Hive through hive.stats.io.
So far I have 9.34% effectiveness in curation rewards, and I'm working to increase it a little more, through trial and error.
How exactly does it work? I have no idea how the logarithm works, but it is true that the votes that follow after yours influence it positively.
For example, I upvoted a post 14 hours after it was created, and it was 135% effective; Sure, it didn't have big votes when I upvoted the article. This happens regardless of what time I vote, but it does matter to you to see that the big accounts have not voted for it before.
I imagine that here in Blurt it should work the same, however, there is no tool to check it.
I wonder how that tool calculates "effectiveness". (Hopefully better than the way mRNA vaxxines were calculated to be effective!)
One way we could do it here on Blurt is:
If my vote that was made before all the other votes is bigger than the vote that was made after all the other votes, we know that it is important to vote early when trying to maximize payout/reward size.
Does that sound good? I may create a post for that experiment soon.
it will be very interesting!
When I spoke, some time ago, with an influential person in the Hispanic community in Hive, about this issue, he told me several points to consider:
1.- The time to vote
2.- The amount of lit token of the person who receives the vote
3.- The vows that follow after
4.- Vote within the first 24 hours
From there, I did my own research with the HiveStats tool, which calculates all the moves made, both as an author and as a curator, coming to the following conclusion:
1.- Indeed, when you vote first than the strong votes, your earnings increase
2.- I have had good results voting within 24 hours, not necessarily 5 or 6 minutes after the publication came out
3.- The amount of power that the account receiving the vote has is not important.
My APR on Hive was 0.00% because I had delegated my HP; To test, I got over 1500 HP back to start voting manually and automatically, taking about 2 weeks to get to the 9.36% I have now. It has reached almost 10% and has gone down to 9.10% without breaking out of that range since.
I still have about 1700 delegated HP, and I'm thinking of getting it back to use for daily healing, but not knowing for now how much it produces for me in the week, I've left it like that, however, that information is also in the same tool as I use to monitor my account on Hive.
Sounds good Ray. I look forward to finding out exactly how this works on Blurt!
What an useful topic you have shared with us! You're phenomenal in your recent posts.
Thanks, this strategy you mentioned is best for those who has huge blurt power to curate more post so as to get huge payout in return.
In Summary not for the money but to curate quality content that share value daily.
Awesome insight buddy!!! 🙏❤️👍 100% upvote from me!!!
This is such a good experiment and a reliable result. It encourages me personally to make a better content. I just hope whales would also recognize those posts who are not on trending or hot topics but with good and original material.
Congratulations, your post has been curated by @dsc-r2cornell. You can use the tag #R2cornell. Also, find us on Discord
Felicitaciones, su publicación ha sido votada por @ dsc-r2cornell. Puedes usar el tag #R2cornell. También, nos puedes encontrar en Discord
Congratulations!
You have recieved a coconutty upvote! 🥥
Thank you for contributing to the Blurt Blockchain!
Keep up the great work!
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