In this post I am explaining how I changed my follow and voting behaviour and how it changed my experience with Steem drastically. They key for that was to limit my follow-list, use Steemauto for automated upvoting for better curation rewards and SteemWorld to monitor the process on a daily basis.
Sweep Your Follow-List
One of the biggest mistakes I have done when I was new on Steemit was to follow way too many people. This will quickly ruin your experience when browsing through your personal feed. If that looks like another trending page to you then you should clearly take the broom and spring clean your follow-list.
The strategy I follow is to only follow and upvote people where I think they are valuable for my personal growth. This is incredibly important to me as we are becoming what we surround ourselves with. To me, growth can either mean that I can learn something relevant from that person. Or it can mean that I feel a connection to that person that makes me want to follow its progress.
After I did that twice I ended up with now 150 people who I follow. I think this is a very healthy number and has still plenty of room to grow before becoming chaotic again and I can still easily browse through their daily posts without braking into sweat. Before that it felt impossible for me to keep an eye on all these people. But with the reduced list I really feel that I am pretty up-to-date with all of those I am following.
Automate Your Upvotes With Steemauto
As these people are now my main focus I have started to put a third of them on my Steemauto Fanbase. With this free and open-source tool you can fully automate your upvotes. This saves a lot of time and can increase your curation rewards drastically because if you upvote early and before others then your share will be higher. If you upvote before 30 minutes post time you will actually get less for each minute closer to zero. So by timing your upvotes with Steemauto you can get in your upvotes at just the right time.
Usually the magic number for the upvote time is 30 minutes because from that moment curators get the full curation reward. However, the curation share each curator receives depends heavily on how early the upvote came as well as how many Steem accounts have upvoted before and after that. This sometimes leads to bringing in the auto-vote even earlier than 30 minutes (i.e. 29, 28, etc) to catch other auto-voters.
If you are new to this keep in mind that you have voting power that drops 2% with each full upvote and regenerates the same amount in 2.4 hours). That means you should consider to limit the upvote weight you set on Steemauto as well as reducing the daily limit. I have the majority of people on just one daily upvote and something between 5%-25% upvote weight.
On the other hand some people create great content but only post occasionally. And then there are people that create extraordinary content on a daily basis. I have those individuals on 100% upvotes and sometimes even up to twice a day. Even with over 50 people on my Fanbase list I am still able to keep a daily equilibrium of my voting power.
Monitoring Accounts
While Steemauto is managing my upvotes I am still observing closely what is going on every day. To get full access to the Steem blockchain activities of my account I use SteemWorld. You can quickly see who, when and how you upvoted as well as track your voting power. I find this incredibly helpful as it gives me insight to micromanage my activitives and optimize my curation reward hunt. It also allows me to tweak my Steemsauto when I think it drains too much of my voting power.
Besides watching my own account I also use it heavily to track what others are up to. This allows me to tweak my upvotes even more and make sure to make the most out of my beautiful Steem Power. I have been able to increase my curation rewards about 100% with this behaviour. At the same time I am supporting those people that truely enrich my life and bring the change to the world I want to see.
My Steem experience has changed drastically with this combination of limited follow-list and automated support for some of these authors. For the first time I feel like I am keeping the upper hand over all the relevant content. And I am having a good feeling about sharing all the love in form of Steem which I create for others while earning curation rewards. Steem is fun again.