Manual Curation & Changes to Bid-Bot

Greetings Steemians,

since the HF21 went live, promotion purchases have been going slower than usual, which results in idle voting power & less revenue for delegators.

While we've already increased the revenue percentage to 115%, (+15% out of our own pocket) we're currently not planning on sharing curation rewards due to various issues this would bring to the table.

Manual Curation

However, our team has started to manually review and curate posts, when the voting power hits 100% and idles.

These manual curation's are targeting mainly posts that bring value to Steem, are of exceptionally high quality or of some other significance. (for example to retain activity by rewarding good content from new users)

On top of that, as delegators, your posts will also be prioritized. Essentially this means: if you're a delegator to Hive account@smartsteem with at least 500 SP and you're actively producing content, there's a chance you will receive an upvote. This also includes resteems. So even if you're not producing content yourself, you can still resteem other posts, which have a chance to receive upvotes. All of this is transparent via our feed: https://steemit.com/@smartsteem/feed

We'll also be monitoring Hive account@steemtank's feed to reward developers actively working on & for Steem.

Moving away from bidding model

We've removed the bid-bot model, where bids are processed after every round. Instead, if you send a transfer to Hive account@smartsteem now, similar as with buying from vote-sellers, you'll receive your promotion as soon as it's processed with a fixed ROI.

We wanted to do this step for quite a while but decided to do so now, to have a great buffer for finding curation worthy content.

Our Promotion Recommendations still apply.

We apologize for the reduced revenue and will keep you updated on the progress we're making towards a total revamp of our promotion services (No ETA yet).

Thank you,
Team Smartsteem