As I mentioned in yesterday's article, there are many ways to invest your savings on Hive. The one I use, and which I will explain in today's article, is to follow wise curators' votes.

What is curating?

Before we start, I'd like to clarify the most used word: curation. Just like an editor can curate a magazine by picking which articles are shown and where, we voters decide what content is displayed in the community frontpages of the Hive blockchain.

The highest-voted posts go up and get noticed more, and the rewarded authors feel the incentive to keep providing quality content that interests the readers. This process is curation, and a curator is someone who browses the blockchain to filter in the good content and upvote it.

Why do people vote?

1. They like the post/topic/etc.
2. They like the author/community/etc.
3. They know the post will get big votes and want to earn a percentage of those votes.

What do you want your money to do?

Perhaps you want to support great authors with your money, or you want to promote talk about a topic or a community. Regardless of the reason, you have to be aware of your intention before you go out and pick a curator.

Some curators will vote only for quality, others only for profit, and some voters will simply autovote certain authors and avoid curating much manually. The curators I pick mix quality and profit. I want to support good content, but I also want my investment to grow healthily.

Step 1: Researching a curator's reason to vote and their profitability

The main tool we're going to use today is called HiveTasks. It holds the answer to both questions. To open my profile, for example (@cryptosharon) with HiveTasks, you write the link like this: https://hivetasks.com/@cryptosharon. Then, you scroll down until you get to Account Operations. Using the filters in the lower left, click Out (so that you will only see the votes the account makes, and not those the account gets) and, in the selection menu, Votes (because there are many kinds of operations in the blockchain). Then, you can browse by day of the week. If you want to see more than one week, you can use HiveBlocks.com.

Researching the reason to vote

Now that you're in the Account Operations section and have filtered to only see votes the account makes, click on any row, and you will see who got the vote and for what post. Click the Permlink, and it will take you to the post on the Hive frontend. Do this many times. Open the article, see what it's about, go to the next article, and when you've opened quite a few, you will know what kind of posts the person votes for. This will help you deduce the reason for voting.

If you do this a lot to many accounts, you will also start to be able to classify the voters by the kind of content they consume. I know:

• voters who only vote for whales' posts,
• voters who curate by effort made and by how interesting the posts are,
• voters who vote for the same authors over and over again
• voters who upvote anything that touches a specific topic of interest, regardless of quality

There are voters who discriminate by language, origin, gender, topic, influence/fame, time on the blockchain, etc. If you have a preference, you'll identify more with certain voters than with others. It'll be easier to pick out which voters you will want to follow.

Researching curation profitability

Vote size

The first thing you have to look at is how big their vote is. The Hive blockchain's curation algorithm makes it so that if you vote before a big vote, you get more money (a percentage of the big vote), and if you vote after the big votes, you get less money (because the big voter gets a bigger share of what comes after it). The earliest votes earn the most of the big vote, and the biggest votes earn the biggest cut of the total cake.

This means that if you vote after a $10 vote, and a few people vote after that with $0.05, and you vote between the big vote and the rest of the people, you will be making much less money than if you had voted before the $10 vote. Therefore, when you are going to follow an account, you must grab one with a smallish vote so that it won't remove your potential reward. You can see below, for example, that my vote is $0.05, so following my votes would be more profitable than to follow @ocdb, for example.

Voting frequency

The next thing you're going to want to look at is how often this person votes. You can reach a high efficiency while voting only sometimes. You want to take a look at the payout date and see that it's well spread out, with good weights, so that it sums 1000% every day (you have 10 votes of 100% weight each day, and if you vote 50%, for example, you can have 20 votes, and so on and so forth, so that an efficient voter's total weight in a day usually usually amounts to 1000%)

An efficient voter never has 100% Voting Power (or Voting Mana), which is the green ball seen in the "Vote size" section.

Researching the curation reward efficiency

If you vote early, before big votes come, with a sufficient weight and with enough voting power (or mana), your efficiency is higher than if you fail to fulfill any of these requirements. The best voters will fulfill these requirements better, and will therefore have higher efficiency levels.

Conclusion of Step 1 (researching the proper curator to follow)

• Follow an account with a smallish vote. Too big and your vote won't be as efficient as it could be, because they will suck a bigger share of the vote. The most efficient vote is one that comes before the big votes come knocking.
• Follow an account that votes regularly. If they fail to vote regularly and you don't follow anyone else, your vote will stagnate and any efficiency gained by smart voting will be lost by not voting enough.
• Follow an efficient curator. The more efficient their vote, if they follow the two previously mentioned requirements, the more efficient your vote will be as well.
• Follow a voter that curates posts that you agree with, or at least don't dislike. If your vote is active in a vote-for-vote scheme, or in a shady project, it's more than likely that you will feel uncomfortable and will fail at other points of your investment. To earn well, avoid cognitive dissonance by choosing something you want to help in.

Step 2: Following a curator's votes

Once you've evaluated your candidates and chosen a curator to follow, follow the guide as follows.

Adding the curator as a trail

Enter hive.vote, log in with HiveSigner, click Curation Trail in the left menu and scroll down until you see the Search for a trail section. Enter the name of the curator you wish to follow and press Search.

Click Follow. It will tell you "Successfully followed with default settings". Now click Settings to optimize you vote.

In Voting Weight, if you are not following any other vote, you will want to set 100%. Leave it as scaling, and the 0 is perfect (wait too much and the big votes will come before your own, and you will lose profit).

That's it. You're following their vote. If you want to divide your vote among more curators, perhaps 4, scale your vote down to 25% each, for example, but following one curator is enough.

Note: I don't follow OCD as a trail; I only followed it here as an example, and unfollowed it afterwards.

Taking care of your default settings.

Go to Dashboard on the left menu and click Settings.

Having 95% upvote mana as a threshold is too little. It's too risky. More likely than not, you will reach 100% when the curator you're following makes a short pause, and you will lose profit. Go down to at least 85% for optimal results.

If you have any doubt, question, suggestion, etc., don't hesitate to pop a comment below. I read all the replies to my posts. I hope you found this useful or at least entertaining.