Well, today I got to understand a whole lot about how the Steem blockchain works. My whole understanding of the various technical aspects of this blockchain has changed since I read the lecture by prof @sapwood. Great work on the detailed lecture that even a newcomer to the Steem platform can easily understand.
Let us now go over the assignment for this week.
1- What will happen if you vote before "5 mins age of a post" & after "6 days 12 hrs age of post" in Steem Blockchain? (Include your own experiences/Examples)
On the Steem blockchain we follow a linear discount period for the first 5 minutes after the author has created a new post. What this means is that for the first five minutes, the curator would be forfeiting part of his curation reward based on the time that he upvotes a particular post.
Since this is a linear discount model, the lost percentage amounts to roughly 20% every minute. So, if you upvote a post before a minute you will be losing 100% of your curation reward, 80% loss if voted at the 1-minute mark, 60 % at 2 minutes, 40% at 3-minutes, up to 0% at 5 minutes. This means that 5 minutes marks the point where you will receive a 100% curation reward.
The same happens after the 6 days 12 hours mark. However, if you upvote after this time period, you will be losing 100% of your curation reward.
In the above screenshot, I tried to see what happens when I upvote after 6 days 12 hour mark. As you can see, my curation reward for this upvote is 0.
So, you might be wondering about what happens to the lost curation reward. Does this disappear into oblivion? No. This lost reward goes into the reward pool for redistribution.
2- How do I check how much reward of a post has returned to the reward pool in Steem Blockchain? Include screenshots (Hint- Steemworld.org)
Voting a post between 5 minutes up to 6days 12 hours after post-publication would ensure 100% curation reward. Voting at times other than these thresholds would result in the reward going back into the reward pool.
You can find the amount of reward that was returned to the reward pool by checking one of your old posts on steemworld.org.
In the screenshot attached, we can see that 0.03% of the reward of @rishabh99946 was returned to the reward pool. This is actually pretty good. I have seen this value go as high as 4% at times.
3- Under what circumstances a curator can earn more than 100% upvote value as curation rewards?
Did you know that a curator can actually earn more than 100% of the curation reward as well?b n The trick to getting this consistently is to upvote a post that has very good content that many people would like to read i.e. it needs to add value to your life.
There are two main requirements to getting more than 100% curation reward.
1- Upvote early: You need to find the high-quality post before most of the other users. However, keep in mind that you vote at the 5-minute mark to ensure at-least 100% curation reward.
2- Upvote before a whale: Whales are steemit users with an enormous amount of Steem Power. Some of the popular whales include @steemcurator01, @steemcurator02, etc. Now, if you find a quality post before a whale upvotes it, your curation reward will also be bumped up because of the high valued vote of the whale.
This can be calculated using the formula:
Pcurator= (1/2) *√Pt (√P1-√P0)Δt
PT= Post Payout at the end of 7 days
P0= Post Payout before voting
P1= Post Payout after voting
And assuming Δt=1
This has been covered by @sapwood in this week’s lecture.
Now suppose I found a high-quality post and upvoted it at the 5-minute mark. For simplicity’s sake let’s assume that I am the first voter as well as my upvote is valued at $1.
Now, in the worst-case scenario, I still stand to make a 100% curation reward i.e. 50% of post payout which is $0.5.
However, let’s say I found the steemit academy lecture post and was the first to upvote it. These posts by the lecturers usually give a payout of around $300. So, let’s see how much would I stand to make in this scenario.
Pcurator= (½)√300(√1-√0)1 = $8.66
This is an 866% in curation reward which is a very good curation reward for anyone to get.
Tip: Whales usually find quality posts to upvote. So, keep your eye out for quality posts. You will be able to earn a lot in curation rewards when you do that.
4- Pick any random post you have voted in Steem Blockchain and indicate the time and position of your voting, what is the projected curation reward?
My effective voting power is very low because of the delegations that I have made. That being said, I do get some curation reward when I upvote a high valued post.
In this example, I have upvoted the week 5 lecture of @sapwood at the 20-minute mark.
The weighted value of my upvote is very low less than even 1 cent. However, my upvote was before the whales @steemcurator01 and @steemcurator07. Hence boosting my curation reward to 0.007 SP.
5- What is the role of curation in better content discovery in Steem Blockchain?
Curation solves a major problem that traditional blogging websites don’t. How often have you seen mediocre blog posts being ranked high in the Google search results? This is because these blogs follow great SEO practices and might also be exploiting some tricks in the Google algorithm. One such example is the extensive use of keywords.
Now, if a new blogger comes along with a great blog post on his new blogging site, it is going to take a long time before Google recognizes this content or sometimes this never happens.
Steem solves this with the curation model. Over here bad posts don’t get a lot of support. Only high-quality posts get support from major players in the Steem blockchain. This bumps up such posts to a higher position in the trending list. Thus, allowing more users to find these posts easily.
With actual readers being in-charge of deciding which posts are good, one cannot use any tricks to get more recognition over here. It is the quality of posts that get precedence over anything.
To compensate the curators who actually read the posts and sometimes even resteem them, they also get a share of the post reward called the curation reward.