Earlier this year, I decided to concentrate on increasing my curation rewards. To measure my efforts, I've been making frequent visits to HiveStats.io.
Simply enter an account name in the box, then press "Search." and the site will show the stats for that account.
HiveStats shows your weekly, monthly and total rewards. It also shows the APR for your account.
I was distraught a few weeks ago to see that my APR had fallen to under 7%.
Follow Your Trail
I tend to upvote posts from outsider accounts figuring that outsiders need more encouragement than insiders.
To trace down the decline in my curation rewards I used the trail feature on PeakD.com. You can see a voting trail with the URL peakd.com/@accountname/trail. To my dismay, I discovered that several whale acccounts are engaged in sneaky down votes.
For example, if you examined the post history for 
If you upvote these accounts; you will lose your curation reward.
I appreciate the work of #hive-watchers. This effort helps reduce spam, plagiarism and other abuse. #hive-watchers places its automatic downvotes shortly after the posting date. I usually see the 
I dislike the sneaky downvotes as they happen just before the system gives a reward. The sneaky downvotes steal the rewards just before payout.
I see automated sneakly downvotes as a form of platform abuse.
Anyone who points out the abuse from the whales on this platform will get smacked down.
To Avoid Sneaky Downvotes
The first step to avoiding sneaky downvotes is to look at the last two weeks in your voting trail. How many curation rewards are you losing each week? I found that I lost 14 of my 70 upvotes one week.
I mentioned that I tend to upvote outsiders.
I've started looking at the post history of accounts before I upvote. I keep finding accounts stuck on the sneaky downvote list.
Again, I love the #hive-watcher effort. Hive Watchers prevents me from upvoting bad posts.
The sneaky downvotes that take place on day six are automatic theivery. They are devised to steal rewards from small curators so that the whales can harvest a bigger piece of the reward pool.
As for the Picture
I mentioned that I am trying to increase my curation reward.
I adopted the habit of ending the day with just under 90% voting power.
A few days ago I decided to mix up the game. I started bringing my smartphone to bed. That way I can end the day by voting one posts before I go to sleep and start the day with an upvote. This reduces the gap between the last and first upvotes of the day.
The idea is really silly for a pathetically small reward. Here is a #meme for the post that I created on Night Cafe.
Of course, if I was smart, I would download code from a script-kiddie that upvotes my friends every 2.4 hours.
If I wanted to be evil, I could tell the script to downvote my enemies on the sixth day.
WARNING: In this post I criticized a whale; So it will probably be downvoted. I might even get included in the list of accounts that receive sneaky six-day downvotes.
I decided to end with a second #meme of a eyeball watching a beehive.
