How important is curation on hive!

Hello, my friends. Today I would like to discuss with you about curation rewards and anything else regarding to the curation process. I use crypto blogging platforms since January 2017 and only two weeks ago I discovered how important curation is.
The last three years and a half I have spent a lot of time and energy writing blog posts using pictures I have captured myself and voting for very few people I have met at steemit but since some weeks ago I had never thought about the importance of curating valuable posts and the rewards possibilities that curating can give to me.

I was away from steemit and blogging about 1 year but I started to write posts again a little later when the hive blockchain came to life. When I wrote my first post I got a very generous upvote from @appreciator and I felt very happy but when I realized that 50% of my earnings go to curators I felt a little bit strange. I didn't know that the 25% share of curators has become 50% and this was the first time I realized how important steem power is. My first thoughts were that this is very unfair and that hive uses the classic capitalist system that most of the countries use worldwide. Rich people becoming richer with the hard work of the poor people. But after that, I thought that these people have invested their precious money and time in the platform so they may deserve the 50% share of the rewards of the posts because if they had not invested their money at the hive blockchain we couldn't have the ability to gain rewards for our blog posts and we would continue to spent our time meaningless at social platforms like facebook, twitter, etc.

My power was never more than 1500 and I have powered down my earnings many times in order to invest in other crypto projects or just to spend them in the real world buying things that they weren't really necessary to me but after the hardfork that gave life to hive, I thought that is a chance to double my power at hive and start writing a new page at my crypto social blog journey.

The real awakening about curation rewards came when I accidentally found myself spying a user's wallet whose posts were always very short just with one picture and a few sentences and his posting rewards were always under 0.5 sbd. His Hive power was about 9,000 and I immediately checked his curation rewards and then I realized where all this power came from. He was gaining 5 to 10 hive power every week unlike me who was earning just 0.25 hive power per week. I felt so stupid and ignorant that all these years I hadn't realized how important curation rewards are.

As I said above my weekly curation rewards were almost 0,25 hive and my hive power was standing nearly to 600 hive which I was never taking advantage of it properly. I never had a curation plan so I was voting only for people I knew without considering the quality of the content I was voting for, or without looking at the time that the posts I was voting for were published. So I thought this has to change, I need to curate more wisely and I may buy a delegation of hive power in order to experiment with curation to see if it is really profitable, what works and what does not.

I visited dlease site and I made a research about delegations. The most profitable apr was 12,84% which is a very good profit for people who have staked their hives. The lower apr was 8.95% which also is not bad at all. In Greece where I live, banks give you 2-3% apr so the difference is huge. I was surprised and I concluded that it worth staking your hives even if you are not active and not having time to curate. You can earn a very good profit just by lending your hive power to other users.

I had about 200 liquid hive available and I checked how many hive power I could lend for 12 weeks, giving a little better apr from the most profitable in the list of delegations in order my offer to be fulfilled quickly. Giving about 13% apr I requested a lease of 6x1000 hive power for 12 weeks at the price of 206 hive.
I requested this delegation late at night and I wasn't sure if that investment of mine was the right choice and maybe it was better to power up these 200 hive. The next day, when I woke up only one of the 6x1000 lease requests have been fulfilled and I was thinking to cancel the five more that was pending but 3 hours later all of my lease requests have been fulfilled so I started this fascinating journey of curation.

I immediately started to research about curation and its profitability but all the posts I could find about curation were very old with outdated pieces of information but thankfully I found some answers in the FAQ of hive.blog. which you can see them at the screenshot below.

After reading very carefully all the informations about curation I started to curate, trying to always keep my voting power above 95%. Every two hours I am checking my voting power at hiveblocks site and if my voting power is above 98% I am visiting the new posts at the hive.blog site and looking very carefully to curate quality posts that are published before 6 minutes in order to increase my possibilities for better curation rewards.
Usually, I find posts at 1-2 minutes and I vote at 4-5 minutes depending on the author and its reputation. While I am waiting for the right time to vote I search the author's data like his voting power, his reputation and his rewards history. If I see that the post's author has low rewards at most of his posts I am looking for another post to curate. But if I see that the author gains good rewards at most of his posts I am waiting patiently refreshing again and again till the posting time comes to the fourth minute and I am voting depending on the quality of the post with 50 or 100%.

I am on the 12th day since I bought the delegation of 6000 hp + 800hp of mine and I am very happy with the results so far. Following the process that I have described above, I had the chance to discover plenty of quality authors with very high reputation or not and to increase my weekly curation rewards from 0.25 hp per week into 13 which I think I can increase more by improving my curation tactics.

Something that bothers me is that it is very difficult to compete with the auto voting bots which sometimes vote before me and take a bigger portion of the rewards pool because they vote before me, exactly at the time of four minutes. I thought I may use them too but I think it is very unfair cause I will vote only for authors that I will include in my voting list and I will exclude many other remarkable authors that deserve more votes and more attention at our platform. Furthermore, I will lose the opportunity to discover and consume many notable posts that If I was auto voting I could not have the chance to discover them and I would be focused again only at the creation of my content and my experience at hive will be again very poor.

The reason I wrote this post today is because I wanted to share my experience with curation and let other users who are ignorant like I was, to know that this platform is not only about content creating but also about consuming and rewarding other authors' posts. It is no coincidence that the rewards are shared 50/50 to authors and curators. In addition to I'd love to read about your curation tactics at the comment section and discuss what works and what does not regarding to the curation. Every advice you can give me or at the other readers of my post will be valuable and I will consider trying them. So I am looking forward to your comments.
Thanks for reading, see you at my next post. :)