New users to Steemit may not know that there is a certain period of time where it is not to their advantage to upvote someone's post or comment, if they want the maximum curation rewards. I myself was not aware of this until I read the FAQs.
When is the Best Time to Upvote on Steemit?
When you publish a post on Steemit, you will notice that there are just a few people upvoting your post in the first minutes of it being published, and then after a certain period of time, suddenly there is an avalanche of upvotes, which then decreases again.
This is because of how the rewards on a posts are shared between the author and the curators. On the amount in $USD that you see for a post, when you click the little arrow down, you will see that 75% goes to the author and 25% goes to the curators, people who have upvoted the post.
Now, this is very easy to remember, but it does not stop here as there is an element of time that is taken into account for the calculation.
Basically, if you upvote a post, or a comment, in the first 30 minutes, there will be a split of the curation rewards between the author and yourself, which means the author can also get curation rewards from the 25% split depending on when you upvote.
Interesting, isn't it?
If you upvote a post immediately after it is posted, from 1 second to 2 minutes and 59 seconds, 100% of the curation rewards will go to the author. So it is not a good idea to upvote a post in that time frame, unless you are the author, or you want to give your curation rewards to the author.
If you upvote a post after 3 minutes, 90% of the curation rewards go to the author and 10% to the upvoter. It is not clear in the FAQs if this goes like this until the next split, which is at 15 minutes or if the author percentage decreases proportionally as time passes.
If you upvote a post at 15 minutes, it is a 50/50% split between the author and the upvoter. It is again unclear if the percentage decreases proportionally until the next split.
Then, if you upvote a post at 27 minutes, the author gets 10% and the upvoter 90% of the curation rewards.
Finally, after 30 minutes, the upvoter gets 100% of the curation rewards.
You can refer to this section of the FAQs for all details.
So as you can see, it is important to upvote a new post or a comment after 30 minutes until the end of the rewards period, I believe, to get 100% of your curation rewards.
I am not sure why it is set like this, but this is an important thing to know about Steemit. It is also important to remember to set your auto-voters to upvote after the 30 minutes period.
I hope this post has been helpful.
Have a nice day.
Would you upvote this post after 30 minutes as passed so you can get 100% of your curation rewards, and follow me for more?
Michel Gerard