The Curation Trail Trap

When you can't dedicate a lot of time to your hive account or if you don't want to look for content to curate, you can automatise your upvotes using the platform Hive.vote.

On Hive.vote you can either set automatic upvotes on authors or you can follow a curation trail.

What is a curation trail?

When you follow a curation trail, you replicate the voting activity of a certain account that you follow. Let's say you follow the curation trail of the account A. Each time account A gives an upvote, your account will also give an automatic upvote. This is a great way to automatise your upvoting activity but there is a trap hidden in there.

mind the Trap...

What is the curation trail trap?

When you follow a curation trail, you have different settings that allow you to do so. You can either follow the account A in a manner that is called scaled. Let's say you set it to 50%. When account A votes with 100%, you will vote with 50%. In a way you delegate the setting of the voting weight to account A. The problem is when you follow a bigger account than you are...

Let's say account A has 1000 HP but you have only 200 HP. If the account A decides to vote with only 50%, he will upvote with 500 HP. If you have put your voting scaled at 100%, you will also vote with 50%. This means that your upvote will be worth 100 HP and you will probably get no curation rewards because you will be under the threshold to get curation rewards!

This is what I call the curation trail trap

How to avoid the curation trail trap?

The best way to avoid this trap is to use a fixed voting weight in your settings. Calculate that your upvote will be worth at least 100 or 150 HP. If you have less than 150 HP, always put it at 100%. Each time the account A will vote, you will set an upvote with 100% and will be therefore above the threshold to get curation rewards.

The second setting is to limit the automatic upvotes in respect to your voting mana threshold. In your dashboard on Hive.vote set it to 85 or 90%. If account A sets 16 upvotes at 50%, you will vote only until this mana threshold has been reached. Afterwards the curation trail will be paused until you regain enough mana. Like that you protect your upvoting mana from dropping too low.

For me what is important is to get a maximum of curation rewards. It doesn't really matter that my account votes on every post that account A votes. I want to be sure that all my upvotes are above the threshold and that my mana doesn't run out. If you put a high mana threshold, it also leaves space for manual upvotes and like that you can combine automatic and manual curation.