Having Steem power doesn’t make you a curator
Yesterday I wrote an article about endless job titles Steem provides. If you think like there is seemingly too much to do on Steemit and you don’t have the time to participate in all of it, give the article a read.
Having the SP does not make you a curator. One has to have time every day to go through a bunch of posts and choose at least 10 to support. It’s one of the most important jobs here, because curators are those that choose what “the face” of Steemit will be. Who will get rewarded for their hard work (posts, tools, projects) and who will get flagged for their actions? Long story short, curators are one of the cornerstones of the Steem Blockchain, but doing it is pretty time consuming.
But I want to use my stake effectively…
We all are stakeholders from the moment we create our accounts. Even if we don’t have time to read through a bigger amount of posts daily to become a hardworking curator, there are ways how to use the stake effectively and (maybe) for the benefit of Steem. Let me elaborate.
Manual voting
To anyone who is not precisely sure how curation reward works I strongly recommend reading my last tutorial article.
Random
I have been using this strategy prior to the latest HF. We had 40 votes daily back then and it was simply too much. I just selected random posts that have caught my eyes. I seriously do not recommend this strategy. Not only you often times don’t know who you are supporting, but you also can’t know what income to expect from such an activity.
Favourite authors
Just because some of us don’t have enough time to be full time curators, it doesn’t mean we don’t have ANY spare time to read through at least some of the posts. By doing that we can get the basic feeling of what any given user is trying to accomplish here and whether we like the style with which he’s trying to do it. What we can do is to choose couple of favourite authors and continuously support them, thus motivating them to keep doing what they already are doing.
Bot voting
Depending on how skilled programmer you are, you can set up various voting bots. Basically both strategies for manual voting still stand. You either set users and times for the bot and it is then voting on every post the user publishes, or you can try to set up a bot that will vote using much more variables (in other words it will use key words, time of publishing and amount of vesting power already voting on the posts to decide what to vote for…basically whatever you are able to program). Bot voting is much more effective than the manual voting because of obvious reasons. It always manages to vote on the posts at the right time and you don’t need to sit behind your pc all the time and wait till the posts pop up.
I have no programming knowledge whatsoever, but I’m currently trying to set up one of the existing bots to help me out. I should soon be able to do so and when I am, I’ll create a detailed tutorial for other programming Neanderthals (such as me lol).
Leasing the SP out
If voting is not an option for you and you don’t want to just sit on your stake (because why would you refuse to increase your income in the first place?) you can lease the SP out. @minnowbooster is providing such a service. Quite some time ago I have published my detailed research about it. Keep in mind that they have done various “number changes” and it is now much more profitable for the one who is being leased to (that means less profitable for the leaser, but it still is pretty good…do your own research though). Keep in mind that you can’t control what the guy/gal you leased the SP to will be doing with it. You can either check the account you’re leasing to prior the lease, or you can, through the Blockchain, oversee their voting actions, and if need be, end the contract early.
