Curators function is essential for the blockchain since it is the main method used to reward authors and distribute the inflation. The bigger the curator stake the larger the votes/rewards.

I have made a similar post to this one in April 2020, or year and half ago.

A lot of time passed since then and there was also a hardfork that changed the way the curation works, removing the 5 min rule and changing the curve as well, making it more flat.
In theory curators now don’t have to rush and frontrun curation on posts, and also the amount of stake that has voted some post doesn’t increase the curation rewards exponentially but it is more linear, although not straight up linear 😊.

Here we will be looking into the top curators. The ones with the highest voting power and the highest earnings. How are they doing in distributing their voting power. How many votes they made? How many authors they reward? Do they distribute the rewards equally to those authors?

The data presented here is for the period November 12 till December 12, 2021. Or the last 30 days.

Top Curators By Hive Power

Here are the top curators that hold the most Hive Power at the moment.

Note that this is HP under management, meaning it can be delegated as well, not directly owned.

The @appreciator account has the highest HP under management, 9.5M HP, mostly because of the delegation that it receives from the @freedom account. Next is @ocdb and then @blocktrades.

The accounts on the bottom of the chart are around 1M HP.

Top Curators By Earnings

This chart is pretty much in alignment with the HP holdings although not 100%, as some curators vote more efficiently than others.

Disclaimer: The earnings are approximate and not totally accurate mostly because of the VESTS to HIVE ratio that is changed daily and I have a fix ratio for the period.

These are earnings roughly on a monthly level.

The @appreciator account and @ocdb are on the top with almost 70k HP earned in the period.

Number Of Votes From The Top Curators

Now that we have the top curators by earning let’s see how are they voting.
Here is the chart.

By this metric @ecency comes on top with more than 8k votes in the period, closely followed by @newsflash. @ocdb comes on the third place with around 5.5k votes.

Number Of Unique Accounts Voted From The Top Curators

The number of votes is not as important if those are given out to the same account.
Here is the chart for the number of unique accounts voted from the top curators.

@newsflash has been voting the highest number of accounts with 2.8k authors voted in the period. @ecency comes second with 2.6k accounts voted. @ocdb is on the third place with just above 2k accounts voted. @appreciator, curangel and @tipu all have around 1.2k accounts voted.

Votes Diversification

We have seen the number of accounts voted from the top curators. But is this metric enough? Some can vote a few accounts with large votes, and hundreds of others with tiny votes and the number of accounts voted will be large. This is not telling the whole story.

To check how are the top curators casting their votes between the accounts voted I have calculated the standard deviation in the rewards given out from each of the top curation.

When the standard deviation (STDEV ) is low the votes are distributed more equally, and if the STDEV is high, the votes are distributed unequally between the accounts. Low STDV = good, high STDEV = bad*

Here is the table for the standard deviation of each curator.

Rank	Curator	Authors Rewarded STDV
1	ocdb	0.07%
2	curangel	0.08%
3	ecency	0.08%
4	appreciator	0.10%
5	newsflash	0.11%
6	tipu	0.15%
7	theycallmedan	0.18%
8	leo.voter	0.29%
9	ranchorelaxo	0.40%
10	trafalgar	0.42%
11	themarkymark	0.43%
12	buildawhale	0.45%
13	bdvoter	0.50%
14	threespeak	0.50%
15	rocky1	0.51%
16	blocktrades	2.24%
17	altleft	4.58%
18	alpha	18.70%
19	blocktrades.com	20.36%
20	smooth	31.06%

By this metric @ocdb comes on top with 0.07%, with @curangel and @ecency very close to it 0.08%.

When we use the standard deviation and normalize the number of accounts voted to the top value the final chart looks like this.

With this method @ocdb comes as number 1!
@ecency is very close to it, followed by @newsflash and @curangel.

Most of the five accounts on the bottom of the list give out their votes to the @hbd.funder comments, that has the purpose of stabilizing the HBD peg https://hive.blog/@hbd.funder/comments.

---

At the end I want to point out that curation and quality still remains a subjective topic, and it doesn’t mean that the raking above is the right way to rank them. It is an effort to represent the way how some of the top stakeholders use their voting power.

As we can see some are distributing their votes widely and evenly (the ones on the top), some are somewhere in between, while others have chosen to support the HBD peg.

Still a far better use from back in the days of vote trading :)

All the best
@dalz

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta