https://i.imgur.com/qkZ6kbz.jpg

I personally thought I would cut down on my posting and focus on curation after the dust had settled after the introduction of EIP, the reason being that I thought my author rewards would go down while my curation rewards would go up. The use of @ocdb had increased a lot. As a result, the maximum bids were capped at 10 SBD at some point, which meant that no user could gain more than 1 SBD per day by using the bot. Because I had already used it for about 7-8 months particularly in the spring when extremely few people were using it at all, I thought it would be best to stop using it to give others a better chance and curate with the stake gained from using @ocdb. 

https://i.imgur.com/MHQqhRR.jpg

To my surprise, the free downvotes had such a drastic impact on the profitability of bid bots that the bot accounts had to more or less become manual curation projects to continue providing a return to their delegators. As a result, many of the bot accounts have been dropping large votes, some of which have landed on my posts. I've been making more organically as an author under 50/50 than ever before. At the same time, curation is shaping up to become the kind of competitive game the creators of Steem originally must have envisioned it to be. Blindly auto-voting authors who regularly get a lot of support is not the way to maximize one's curation rewards. That's because so many others are doing it that hitting the sweet spot where one front runs the majority of the vote mass without paying too high an early upvoting penalty is really difficult. This is why it makes a lot of sense to spend some time scouring the chain for new authors who are not popular, yet, and bombard the best of them with well-timed autovotes while resteeming their posts until they become as popular as they deserve to be. In general, the most efficient maximizers have seen their curation rewards cut while the rest have caught up. Even pure manual curation isn't as inefficient as it used to be. My curation rewards have increased by a third and not the 45% or so they should've if the changes in the math were taken at face value.

While I'm sure some of the dynamic consequences are still in the process of manifesting themselves, it should be justified to say that it's clear that manual curation has never been better on Steem. What I'm looking forward to is the introduction of communities next year. That's when curation should be even more effective as because of the better organization of content on here.

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There's a solar powered mobile phone charger free for the public to use in the park where I took the above photos. 

https://i.imgur.com/MF90ERm.jpg

https://i.imgur.com/N78NAuX.jpg