Is it better to vote EARLY on Blurt?

The next in my series of experiments on aspects of Blurt curation is finding out if it matters WHEN you vote on content. Is a vote shortly after posting worth the same as a vote a few days later? Is there an incentive to identify high-quality content before the pack? Is there any point to the tactic of bots (including BlurtBooster) that vote exactly 5 minutes after posting? This is another important aspect of curation that the FAQ doesn't explain. It's time we run a few tests and figure it out ourselves!

My other tests and experiments about curation:

Does Voting Power matter?

Voting Power barely matters!

Does Blurt "dust" tiny rewards? (Spoiler: No!)

Are votes (and curation rewards) bigger when they're on popular content?

Votes on popular content ARE bigger!

There's no question that voting before 5 minutes of the content being created negates some of your curation reward, so if you're trying to maximize your income, don't vote until minute 5 or later. But now we want to know if a vote is bigger (for the content and the curation rewards) if it comes BEFORE a lot of other votes, rather than after. Are we rewarded for being quick and accurate curators on Blurt?

The experiment

This one is also fairly simple.

I'm going to create 2 similar comments in the comment section below. Then I'll vote on one of them. Over the next few days, readers will vote on both comments (hopefully roughly equally). Then I'll vote on the other comment, and compare the sizes of the 2 votes.

If the "early" vote gets a significant boost over the "late" vote, we'll have our answer.

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."

For me, it's hard to tell exactly what the FAQ is talking about there. It's short and ambiguous. We'll know a lot more after this experiment.

How you can participate

I am leaving 2 comments below this post. Please vote on both. If you don't have 2 votes to spare, no problem, you can split a vote in half (50% to each comment).

NOTE: I am going to vote on 1 of the comments. This is going to make them uneven (in number of votes, and potential payout), but please go ahead and vote on BOTH comments. After the experiment, I'll vote on the other comment, then compare the size of my votes.

We've already figured out a few important quirks of Blurt curation, and now I'm asking for your help again. Please hit those comments with all you've got! It won't work unless there's a significant sum of votes. Thank you!

DRutter