Delegation VS Curation

As you probably know on HIVE both a poster and an upvoter get rewards. Good posts hopefully gets good votes and everyone wins. Bad posts get ignored (or downvoted) and upvoting them, well, your rewards should be limited or nothing.

But if you are just looking for return?

Well, that is where communities are useful. You can delegate your HP to a dedicated curator which will look through the community posts, upvote the best ones and then send you 80% (or so) of the rewards. @PAKX, @actifit, @amazingdrinks and @diyhub are the curation accounts that this community is supporting (many more to come I hope).

However, if you want 100% of the return you should just curate yourself. Except that takes a lot of time. So... if you want 100% of the return and 0% of the effort that is where hive.vote (website) is useful because it allows you to follow populator curators and mimic their vote. Alternatively you can take your favorite authors, make a fanlist, and upvote them. Either way you should get a better return.

But did we?

So I made 4 accounts to follow: Actifit, OCBD, Hive-Learners and Great Little Dragons (plus more)....

I sort of assumed they would be pretty similar but...

@codbane.gld which follows OCDB? Up 8.32% in two weeks.
@fitatic.gld which follows Actifit? Up a measly 3.26%!
@emberlash.gld which follows Hive Learners? Up 8.37%!
@gromphus.gld which follows Great Little Dragons? Up 6.9%

Now a couple of things to know about curation.

1. If you have too little HP your votes won't count and you get nothing. I have 300HP staked in these accounts and that's about as low as I would go. If you have less--Delegate (or Post)

2. 3% of that return is based on staked HIVE getting a return just for being staked.

3. It takes a full week before you get anything. In that regard an 8% return gets 3% from staking HP and the remaining 5% is actually 1 weeks returns calculated at 2 weeks time. Or 8.37% should be 5.37*2 or 10.74%....Not bad at all.

Why is Actifit so bad? No idea but it is barely better than just leaving my HP doing nothing.

Why is Great Little Dragons less valuable? Because the posts here have few eyes and lightly voted on posts don't pay out as well.

So... my congratulations to the curators at OCBD and the Lazy Panda (I think @gwajnberg is part of that crew but could be wrong). As for my following the actifit trail? I think that stops soon. Why settle for such a paltry return when there are better options. What do you think @dlmmqb? Does !PAKX have a curation trail I can follow :)

Just for fun. Here is the list of payouts to @emberlash.gld

If you notice there are an awful lot of 0.005HP payouts which is awesome! However, if those ever get down to 0.002 then HIVE decides they are too small to count and they turn to ZERO! No rewards (ugh). So one more reminder...No following a curation trail if you don't have HP, it is just wasting your HP potential