Hey everyone!
Some of you may be aware of some personal ways I've been trying to make the platform more fair to curators and other users while many of you may not know since it's more on a blockchain level and hard to notice.
Thought I'd go over a few of those things for the newcomers out there.
Curation Rewards
Ever since I joined Steem over 21 moons ago I have only voted manually on posts. You may think that this is nothing special and that many others do it to, but given the amount of rewards you miss out through voting manually instead of setting up autovotes and voting on the correct times on popular authors, you probably lose about 2-3 times curation rewards doing it manually.
To this day I am at 44,615 manual votes, which means that I've read the majority of those posts before voting on them.
Okay, but instead I could just have been chasing max rewards by sitting in front of my feed all day and catching the posts at a good time, right? Well, no. Ever since I started the 
I also have a curation trail on Streemian that I've been running for a long time which automatically increases my curation rewards on the posts I vote on, but since the majority has been ocd nominations which most of the time are over 1 day old, this meant that the curation trail didn't follow on my votes there too.
Posting rewards
Oh well, you're an early adopter - you don't care much about rewards cause you were posting a lot back in the day when Steem price was hovering around 10 cents, right?
That would be true, except that when the price of Steem was the lowest I was too busy trying to get more people onto the platform and raising interactivity through comments, here is a graph of my post rewards that I could catch from steemwhales.com (it hasn't been updated in some time and I couldn't go further back than these dates)
If I recall correctly I only had around 250 posts written by the end of that time and over 8000 comments, the UI here on Steemit doesn't differentiate between them but you can find them on steemitboard.com if you enter your username there. Now I am at 628 posts and 9991 comments which of 99% of them are not self-voted on and as many oldtimers here can tell you in the past no one used to reward comments.
I never voted on comments cause I didn't like the idea of voting on your own comments unless it was something important that required me to have that comment on the top order of a post. It was always a lot more fun to receive votes on comments than to vote them up yourself and hog all the attention. I have noticed lately though that it indirectly has made me a lot more lazy to comment as I don't vote on them and I've been meaning to comment a lot more on posts that I curate but there's been so much going on lately that I've barely had the time to use Steemit in the same way I used to. Hoping that will change soon.
I've always wanted to focus on curating and commentating for engagement, seeing as how much higher the post rewards are though and that they made it possible for me to raise my stake to be able to curate more efficiently I forced myself to post more, especially now with the weird SBD surge that we have been having. I'm thankful that the community has supported my mediocre posts and I'm glad I was able to increase my SP that way to both support the price of Steem and the curation I will be doing in the future on the platform.
Something that has bugged me for quite some time and I notice happening on the platform but doesn't really surprise me is votetrading. A lot of people do it because they know this way they can maximize their posts rewards. There's a lot of people who are not aware of all the work some Steemians do outside the platform and around it and they don't receive a lot of rewards for their contributions unless they are posting at the same time. I like one of the recent posts by 
Lastly some other ways I've been trying to help other curators on the platform is that for many months now I've refrained from voting my own posts at the same time I post them and instead done it after 30 minutes. It just felt wrong and there are some others out there who feel the same way and want to reward their voters more by offering them more curation rewards. Yet the majority of authors want to just maximize rewards and self-vote instantly which has resulted in a much lower percentage of rewards going to curators than to authors and is a reason the next hardfork will change how that works by making early votes go back to the reward-pool instead of the author. I like that change of course as I've tried my best to help that percentage out with my own posts in the past, but I thought I'd try and be a bit more selfish until the hardfork is in effect.
That's why I thought I'd ask my followers what they think about it, so let me know in the comments. Thanks for reading!
