Hello STEEM Community,
Curation rewards represent a quite large (25% I believe) share of the newly created coins in the STEEM network. However, we can see on steemwhales that a large number of steem power holders are inactive, and don't convert their voting power into rewards. A lot of "active" users are also missing out. I tried myself with a period of botting and a period of regular manual curation. See for yourself:
You can clearly see when I am botting and when I'm not. And when I'm not I'm probably missing out on at least 10 STEEM a week. A lot of users are starting to delegate their voting power to 'curation trails', but this is out of the question for me, I'd rather not have to rely on anyone, even if it means a lower outcome.
The bot I used is a chrome extension I published a while ago and got a few feedbacks from the chrome store that allowed me to fix a bunch of bugs over time (such as the slider for voting for big holders, or the masked nsfw posts that stopped the bot). I also added the option to automatically upvote certain authors (you can edit the list of authors in the settings).
Download the bot 
Download on chrome web store
Download from source on github
It is easy to customize the behavior of the bot in the options (right click the icon and click options):
- You can easily change the weight of the $, votes, comments or reputation for the scoring of the posts.
- You can also easily control the timing of your votes (10-30 minutes after post creation is usually what works best)
- You can have a list of auto-upvoted authors
Running the bot 
This bot works by just browsing steemit.com like you and me. To turn the bot on, just left click the icon (it will change color). Then, just open a new tab to https://steemit.com/created (or any other page with a list of posts). The bot will keep on scrolling the page, until it fetches 200 contents. If the top post has enough score to be upvoted according to your options, then it will be upvoted. Then the bot will refresh the page and repeat the same process again.
N.B: The bot will only work if the steemit tab is in the foreground. Best thing to do is to put it in its own small window.
If you have any questions to get set-up, if you have any suggestion, or if you think you found the best options to maximize curation rewards, feel free to comment. I will gladly answer,
Heimindanger
www.steemwhales.com
P.S: There is currently a slight problem with SBD which is valued at about $2.00 US (instead of $1.00). This is the reason why your 'estimated value' is currently off on steemwhales. I have currently changed it to display SBD, but I am wondering if users would rather have a real US$ estimated value. Let me know.