I joined Hive/Steemit in May, 2018 and i have liked it for it's utility and real world application unlike any other cryptocurrency projects at the time. I have witnessed dApps being built on this blockchain and suffer failures and massive success like PeakD itself. I have seen the divorce between Steemit and Hive over Tron's take over of Steemit, and for better or worse, i have hated the sight of community coming apart like this and loved how it has stood the test of time and come back stronger.
I have quit Hive quiet a few times, leaving my HP on auto-pilot in the hands of many delegation projects and curation bots over the time, and It has never impressed me. I feel, i have been part of a Hive Blockchain, a project, that demands attention & time, and I have betrayed it's trust by delegating my HP to projects in which a bot, or a team of people manually curate/reward good content. I like the aspect of supporting good content but I also am witnessing the loss of good readers because we delegated the responsibility of reading to a bunch of people and called it a support project. I also see that over the years the quality of content has deteriorated, and i feel, if you have projects that would upvote your content just because you are part of a scheme or a philosophy, then you are likely to get content that says "How i brushed my teeth this morning!" with 20 upvotes.
This post is not meant to discourage or demean any project on Hive, they are doing best they can to keep the content creators on this platform by providing much needed support in terms of upvotes and rewards, but like every good thing that is too good to be true, there is a tradeoff
So, around 4 months ago I decided to remove all my delegations, unfollow any and all curation trails, and see what I can do manually and so I have been doing for the past 4 months. These 4 months have been wonderful in so many ways because I got to talk to beautiful people from around the world through comments on their content, got many new followers, and read some of the good content on Hive. Everything is not yet gone to shit, and AI use is on the rise but there are still people who use it responsibly.
I just felt about bragging about this. Please forgive my rants!
To give you a little perspective, and since I have been called Nerd, i wrote this tool that gives me some statistics about how I had been doing before my manual intervention and How has it been going since the last 3 months or so.
This is online and I can access it on internet anywhere but, I am not yet making it public because it's really of no use to anyone except someone brain-dead like me.
This is a summary of the Hive I have earned over last 30 days in rewards for curating content on Hive, and some of it is via delegations...
It also shows how I am earning over 0.31+ HP every day now, compared to something that curation projects were making me...
So, here is a little history in the picture,
As you can see, the first circle is when I stopped following any curation trail, there is no Hive earned for a few days because I was still playing around and figuring out what to do. Before that you can see the bars which show number of upvotes distributed on a particular day and it is decent number, not too much and not too low either... I thought i wasn't upvoting enough using curation trails and I tried to hype the upvotes manually as you can see in the first square.... But then i checked the results, and It wasn't making much difference in the earnings, until I found a balance, the trick was to find quality content, and upvote it only if I liked it. That's my second square in the picture, consistent amount of upvotes, and consistent earnings.
To contrast it, here is the growth chart of HP Earnings
As you can see, it's not about the number of votes you give, It's about choosing the right content at the right time. Choosing your content that is relatively newer and has quality content will generally lead to many natural upvotes that would increase your chance of getting a better share of the reward pool.
Overall, I am satisfied for improving my HP earnings from 0.21 to 0.31+ every day. This is not for author rewards or rewards on my comments, its just the reward from the upvotes/curations