I've changed the way I vote, and there will be more changes to the way that I vote coming. Its a fine balance that I am still trying to work out. A few weeks ago, fellow steemian, @mattclarke kindly lent me some of his Steem Power.
At first, I searched for really awesome content to upvote and follow. I found much of this among the people that I already follow. A lot of my VP (about 15% a day) was consumed by the automatic voting that I had set up at Steemvoter.com to help reward people's blogs who I really, really love.
I then realised that I could use the enormous amount of Steem power (relatively speaking) to try and see if I could get the most curation rewards possible, by running an autovote script called LukyLuke for the last ten days, that has been built by @inertia, available on github. Read the post about the bot here, if you're interested.
Essentially, what this bot does it watches the transfer field for the selected accounts and then checks for URLs to Steemit Posts. It then goes and votes on those posts, if the account hasn't already voted on it. In theory, you beat randowhale or booster to the vote, cashing in on their curation rewards. I set up a virtual machine, configured the bot, and let it run wild...
Here's the results, after tinkering with the script for 10 days: (Its a lot of votes)
Voting Summary
| Day | Votes | Curation |
|---|---|---|
| 20/07/2017 | 406 | 2429 |
| 21/07/2017 | 1028 | 3911 |
| 22/07/2017 | 1018 | 3118 |
| 23/07/2017 | 1042 | 1562 |
| 24/07/2017 | 1529 | 6213 |
| 25/07/2017 | 1363 | 6213 |
| 26/07/2017 | 1338 | 6213 |
| 27/07/2017 | 1081 | 6213 |
| 28/07/2017 | 533 | 2590 |
Visualisation:
That's a lot of votes. The insights: On average, each day, booster, randowhale and minnowbooster are used over 1000 times. The first and last day of the statistics I have generated from my bot are skewed, as I've turned it off for now. I'm not really sure if its hurt or increased my curation rewards, as there are four days of daily data for curation rewards missing from SteemWhales, so I averaged those out to the 6213. I also noticed when reviewing the data on @lalala's daily top voter list ,that there's a few other 'bots' or accounts using luckyluke along the way.
Once my voting power is restored (this will take a few days) I have a new plan. I'm going to be more active in rewarding the authors that I enjoy, who produce consistent, quality content directly, more often; and; I'm going to trial rewarding my follower's content. I aim to maintain about 80% voting power, and if I see a remarkable post, it will get a 100% upvote, and a comment along the way.
luckyluke does not have a place in that world. If I remain above 80% VP at the end of a given day; then he may. I don't know yet, but I do know it feels harder to curate consistently good content lately. I'm aware of the various curation projects and communities propping up; and read their daily summaries; its good work that they're doing. Sometimes that stuff gets my vote, too! :)
What are your opinions on voting bots like the above? (I am currently recharging my VP, so forgive a lack of upvotes from me in any comments!)