Confirmed: Voting Power has no effect on Curation Rewards!

The results are in! Running your VP down makes your votes worth less, but you get more of them! The net result is no change to the payouts you allocate to content-creators, nor to how much you earn in curation rewards. This goes against most conventional thinking on BLURT, and has implications for how we all manage our curation strategies!

Related posts:

• The Timing of Curation
• The 20 biggest manual curators on Blurt
• How does Voting Power really affect curation rewards on Blurt? Help me find out!

Quick summary:

• I calculated the top 20 curators on Blurt using their Blurt Power and their average Voting Power
• MK (Blurt's #1 manual curator) commented that VP has very little effect on curation rewards
• I did preliminary testing and calculations, and discovered that a full vote reduces VP by 2% of current amount, not an absolute 2% as previously believed
• I ran a larger experiment to find out what happens at much lower VP (such as 50%)

Results

Thank you to everyone who commented on my last post on this topic, giving me targets for dozens of 100% upvotes, and allowing me to drain my VP down to 50% and below.

My hypothesis was: "At about 50% VP, considering 20% linear healing, and a 2% drop from the current value with each full vote, I will be able to give out TWENTY votes at 100% strength every day - instead of the usual ten - without overall depletion of my Voting Power. Granted, it appears that my votes will be worth about half what they are when my VP is near 100%, meaning around 25 BLURT each instead of the usual 50. But if I'm able to give out twice as many, that means I'll still be handing out the same amount of payouts, and earning the same amount of curation rewards."

It actually took longer (more voting) than I thought, but I finally made it below the half-way point. I then allowed my VP to heal until it was exactly 50.00%:

I dished out the full upvote (100% weight), refreshed my browser, and found another comment to vote on. This gave me the result I had predicted:

A full vote only used 1% of my Voting Power! I'm used to maintaining my VP in the high 90s, where full votes drain VP by (almost) 2%.

Also note that the value of my full vote is about 26 BLURT, down 50% from where it was the other day when I was fully charged:

MK (@mariuszkarowski) is absolutely right!

After calculating that VP reduces by 2% of the remaining amount (not a nominal 2%), I had the missing piece of the puzzle, and from there everything has gone as expected. (Hypothesis confirmed.)

Conclusions

At about 50% VP, we can expend 20 full votes per day without draining ourselves any lower. As we all know, when maintaining VP near full, we can only do 10. The total amount of BLURT we are allocating to content (and earning in curation rewards) is unchanged, but at lower VP we are spreading it out over more content. This has pros and cons.

At 10% VP, we can do 100 full votes every day! Of course, they're pretty small at that point.

At 1% VP, we could theoretically vote (at full 100% weight) 1000 times a day! Unless we have a massive amount of BP, the votes will be microscopic. In fact, as @logiczombie pointed out on my last post, the fees for voting would be onerous, making it financially unfeasible.

My previous assertion that good curation involves maintaining VP as close to 100% as possible (without sitting on full and wasting votes) was wrong. My "Timing of Curation" post still has a lot of valid information, but that part is completely invalidated by the fact that VP actually goes down by 2% of the current level. Now that I (and we) understand that properly, I will remake that post in the coming days.

I also intend to redo my "top 20 curators" post soon, negating the calculations around voting power, now that it is confirmed to have no effect on curation rewards!

Essentially, most of us don't need to worry about our Voting Power! Smaller curators (accounts with less BLURT powered up) should probably still aim to keep their VP fairly topped up, to keep fees as proportionally low as possible, and to avoid having to spend hours every day finding enough content to expend all their votes on. But medium and larger curators shouldn't watch their VP much at all - other than to ensure it isn't sitting at full (being wasted), of course.

My gratitude to everybody who pitched in with comments, information, and suggestions. And thank you to MK for challenging the status quo! I think this was a valuable exercise. It will change the way I curate, dramatically. I hope you've found it just as enlightening!

DRutter