I'm making this post for future reference whenever someone asks me how Hive's curation system work. I realized the information about the changes in curation are scattered in a few posts so I compiled them here and have written short notes to save some time.
Disclaimer: This is based on how I understood the system with the limited information provided by the posts linked below this point. I could still be wrong about my interpretation so it's better to take some time reviewing the sources yourself. Curation systems can change during Hard Forks and this information may become obsolete in the future.
The Basics:
Whenever you upvote a post/comment, you get rewarded in HP based on your amount of staked HP and vote weight used after 7 days at post payout. It's a linear curation curve with a twist.
Ideally, you should be voting posts / comments that are less than 24 hours old to maximize your curation rewards and avoid curation penalties. As the post ages past 24 hours, succeeding voters will have their potential HP rewards gradually diminish in value with the highest penalty occurring at the 6th to 7th day near payout.
I don't understand the math involved but for us casual Hive users that just want to know how to get the most out of curation curations, just vote within the 24 hour period after the post / comment has been published and you'll be fine.
A tool I use to monitor if I'm doing things right with my voting trails and manual curation is going to Hivestats.io site which gives you a general idea of your account's stats. Just replace my hive name with yours and check at the bottom of the site where there's a "pending curation rewards".
I look at the "Voted After" and "Efficiency" closely. Voted after corresponds to the time of the post's age when you upvoted and efficiency is self explanatory. Ideally, your efficiency should just be ranging around 98-100%. The efficiency decreases greatly when you're voting after 24 hours and the post /comment already has existing votes before yours. The opposite happens where efficiency can go higher than 100% when you vote early and other accounts voted after 24 hours on the same posts. Your concern should be keeping the efficiency high.
An exception which is highlighted on the image in red box is voting for posts / comments that are beyond 24 hours. You can see that my efficiency is at 99.65% despite the comment I voted for is near the payout time. I should be having some penalties right? well the penalties can take effect only when there were votes already present prior. Since it's already on the 6th day and no one voted on the comment, the system treats it as if I'm the first voter.
Other exceptions that decreases your curation rewards is the having the post / comment you voted on get downvoted which negates some of the potential rewards.
As a recap:
- Vote on posts / comments that aren't passed 24 hours.
- You don't receive curation reward penalties even voting near payout as long as there are no votes prior to yours.
- Your curation rewards can decrease if the post you curated got downvoted.
Below this point are posts explaining the system and changes that led us to the current one used by the blockchain.
The Evolution of Hive: Hardfork 26
Need to change your vote? No problem. There is no more vote edit penalty. You will still get curation on the new value of the vote, as if there was no edit at all.
Dust votes, predominant among new accounts without much stake, are now considered the same as regular votes.
A unique perspective on Hard Fork 25
The new curve worked, without it you will no longer be penalized for smaller rewarded posts. The curve won't be linear, but it will be close to linear, and nearly exactly linear within the first 24 hours. Everyone who votes within the first 24 hour (this time window may change) of a post/comment will receive the same portion of the curation pool based on their stake. No one within this time frame will have a unique advantage. This will disincentivize front running large votes and voting quickly automatically to get in first to get the most rewards.
For the sake of trivia, here's a post detailing how the old curation system works on Hive which is now obsolete. It currently ranks at the top of my google searches compared to the latest updates.
The old system before Hardfork 25 contained reverse auction mentioned in this post:
The reverse auction is the five-minute window where you sacrifice a percentage of your curation rewards to get a better place in line and ultimately gaining more curation on all the votes that come after you. This window is being removed completely and there will be no penalty to voting early. Typically curation rewards only accounted for 25-30% of post rewards as a good portion of them were lost to the reverse auction.
How does curation work on Hive? what are the rules, posting and voting limits? HiveBasics.
There's no need for you to read the link directly above since it's outdated but for those that are just curious of how things used to work, you're welcome.
I hope this post ranks higher on the searches so that people new to Hive can get a grasp at how the curation system works at the time of this writing. An attempt at evergreen.
Thanks for your time.