To maximize your rewards on Hive, you need to organize your life so that the vote power bar never touches 100%. I am at 99.48% and need to find a post to curate within the next hour.
I want to have a fresh post on my site, just in case the accounts I upvote decide to visit my blog and upvote one of my posts.
So, the pressure is on. I need to write a post and drop upvotes before the vote power bar touches the 100% mark.
I read a post yesterday that said that people should use curation trails and automated voting rather than manual voting. This will keep their account from touching the dreaded 100% value.
A person seeking maximize rewards would never manually upvote as the robots are better at timing votes.
I admit, I had been planning my day around my HIVE vote bar. The idea of having a robot vote for me sounds nice. I would get a higher curation reward, and wouldn't have to waste time reading posts.
Rather than hiring a robot, I stopped and asked myself the question: What happens when the vote power bar is at 100%?
The answer is simple: The whole community benefits.
The rewards pool is created by interest on HIVE. Hiveblocks.com shows the current rewards pool on the right side of the page. I just looked. It showed the value: 829,854 HIVE ≈ $204,144.
(As I understand this is the rewards that the system will give out over a seven day period).
When I vote, I place a claim against this rewards pool. My upvote decreases the rewards pool.
My upvote is not a fixed value. I get a percent of the rewards pool.
If I forget to upvote; the money stays in the pool. The people who remembered to upvote get a bigger reward.
After the Hardfork, there was a large number of people who only upvoted on HIVE and others who upvoted only on SteemIt. Both rewards pools jumped up in value. As I recall the rewards pool for both sites jumped to 950,000 after the hardfork. This meant that the accounts that were upvoting got a larger reward.
It was wonderful ... It was the golden age of HIVE. The robots are now running full steam. The pool is smaller and we get less for our upvotes.
The robots usually upvote exactly five minutes after a post is written. Some of the curation bots create curation trails that throw a dozen upvotes at at a post in a specific order based on the amount users paid the bot.
I don't like the robots. They do not do a good job of curation and they harvest a disproportionate amount of the pool.
In conclusion: While It is true that you lose some of your curation rewards when your upvote power is at 100%. The money does not disappear. It simply stays in the pool. This increases the size of the pool for the community at large.
The robots and curation trails that harvest the pool might maximize the rewards received by an account, but they actually harm the platform because they do a lousy job of curation and they decrease the rewards of the people who are actively curating and trying to write posts.
The picture shows my account at the beginning of this post. I need to find a post to curate before the bar reaches 100%, or I will lose some of my claim on the reward pool.
If I don't find a post worth upvoting; it would be better for the community that I leave the account at 100% than to upvote a subpar post.
PS: I rarely downvote. The downvote was designed to reduce some of the abuse of the rewards pool by countering some of the robotic activity.
I don't downvote because it would be so easy for the writer of a robot to program their bot to automatically downvote my posts. Since I usually only get a few pennies per post, I could see all of my author rewards wiped out by a single bot.