Thoughts on curation and a 2,000 SP delegation to msp-curation (it's now 7kSP total)

So, since I got involved with bidbots I've had to also start talking a lot about curation. Curation is a hot topic item and it goes hand in hand with curation and delegation because all of these things impact the rewards that are paid out on a daily basis. There are people saying curation is broken, and it's tough to know how to answer that... but I want to share a little about how curation works especially in an account lifecycle.

Dividends

One of my favorite ways to view curation rewards is through the lens of dividends. If you own certain types of stock (or crypto) they will pay you dividends. This is a return on your investment paid by the company as an incentive to continue to hold that investment. Steem has this through inflation. Every year a little less than 10% of total steem in existence will be added to the Steem economy. The blockchain generates new coins through inflation, and then distributes those new coins from inflation into the rewards pool. When you get post rewards you remove tokens from the (virtual) rewards pool and add them to your wallet.

By owning steem you control a certain amount of where all the new steem will go. Essentially your ownership of the block allows you to determine where inflation heads. Another way to look at this is you're receiving dividends and you're able to apply them however you want. You can self vote, circle jerk, not use, give to a bid bot, curate heavily, delegate, and probably a few other things I haven't thought of. You're essentially controlling how you spend your dividends and how to use them.

"Curation is broken"

One of the concerns I see is that curation for minnows is broken. I'd like to share that it's currently working, but there isn't much incentive for minnows to curate beyond using their curation to make friends as opposed to make a living. The argument that thoughtful curation doesn't provide a lot of benefit is true (for minnows), but fails to take into account the fact that curation rewards are relative to how much stake you have.

Lifecyle

If you're here for fun then ignore everything I'm about to say and do things for fun. If you're here to make some rewards then let me share with you the most rewarding activities that you can do on the block.

Minnows (newer accounts)- Your best bet is to comment and socialize in offchain groups. If you post you'll make next to nothing unless you hit the lottery. You don't have enough followers most likely to see any returns. If you curate you have so little stake that it won't make much impact. It's like trying to live off of the dividends of 1 share of IBM. So, your best bet is to comment. Not many people will see your posts, but if you're making good comments on a post with lots of views people may see and read those. You'll make 10x what you could do other activities by commenting a lot, and the other main benefit is that you'll also start to collect followers.

Good followers are the most important thing you can have around here as that determines how much money your posts will make. The more eyes with more stake that see your post the more likely it is you'll be rewarded.

Dolphins 5k-50k SP - These folks need to spend the majority of their time authoring. You're at the point where you get more views on a post than you do on a comment buried in someone elses post. You're getting some serious followers and you're starting to earn fairly steady and potentially growing rewards on your posts. You should be authoring to keep getting the word out, and making sure that you're engaging with your audience to keep them coming back for more on your post. Minnows are investing their time to comment on you. You should be upvoting their comments and interacting with them if you'd like to preserve those interactions.

You still don't make that much curating here. You might have 10k steem, but again just like a stock you can't live off of the dividends of owning 500 shares of IBM (unless you're living off the grid in a camper shitting in the woods).

Whales 50kSP or more - Now your life starts to look different. You have 10 votes a day that have post rewards of $6 or more, but those are denominated in rewards bucks which are a mix of SBD and steem. With SBD so high the number that shows up on a post isn't really reflective of what you're going to earn. A better estimate is to take that number and multiply by 5. So a newly minted whale can hit a post with a $30 (USD) upvote 10 times a day. So, that's $300/day they can put on posts. If they are simply curating they could make $60USD/day which is $21,000 per year. This starts looking like some real money. because that is actually how much a mortgage might cost in a year on a $300k house or so.

If they self vote twice that's $108/day. That's now higher than the average family salary in the states or roughly near it. So, when you have some real stake in this place you can make some real money by curating. You also start getting followers just by having steem on the platform. You also start getting large votes from other whales because you have the ability to hit them back with a substantial vote. It's not quite circle jerking because it isn't quite planned, but many of the big votes come on the platform with a tip of the hat and a nod to a friend/fellow whale.

My point

The economics of curation don't favor minnows. And if you're here thinking you're going to do well simply by curating you're going to be sadly disappointed. That said, one of the things you can do as a minnow is to provide a curation service to whales. You can go through the 40k posts and find good ones, and make a page of that. @gmuxx has had some pretty incredible success doing that, and there are others as well. But you have to understand there is a difference in providing the service of finding good posts and actually curating them... you're a minnow.... you vote doesn't do shit, your curation rewards from your voting does even less, but that doesn't mean you have no role in helping to discover good content.

Anyway

Curation takes an assload of time. It's hard to find that time. I also have a ton of people in MSP that are extremely passionate about curating stuff. Currently we're using @minnowsupport to curate, but that drains from all the newest accounts on the platform where that 10-50 cent vote is a large part of their post rewards. So, I've started @msp-curation and given access to @isaria and @juliakponsford. I'll probably add a few others, but the intent is to stop curation from @minnowsupport once this account hit's 10k or more.

So, I recently delegated 2500SP (it was matched by @ausbitbank). I'm delegating another 2kSP today. We'll take curation off @minnowsupport hopefully before 2018 starts.

If you think that curation is important and don't always have time to do it please consider delegating to msp-curation. Here's a link to put 1k SP on the account: https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=&delegatee=msp-curation&vesting_shares=2051057.924655%20VESTS.

Unlike a lot of other msp accounts this one has ZERO automatic voting and is entirely manually curated and it's specifically geared to be 100% human curated.