Recently a Discord buddy asked me about their Hive rewards. They are new to Hive and was confused when they only had posted 2 articles that earned let's say 20 Hive in rewards. They knew that the Author gets 50% of those rewards so they were confused when the 7 day mark happened and they had 15 in Hive rewards to withdraw.

I spent a while explaining the reasonings why there seemed to be a discrepency and what could have led to the "increase" in rewards. And to protect the identity of those making fun of me I have covered up their names.

Something about protecting the guilty or something, I don't know. As much shit as we all hand out in my Discord... they had a point and so I figured, you know what? That would make a good post. So here we go, You asked for it!

Introduction

Disclaimer Time: I am NOT a Hive expert and never pretended to be one either. But I do want to write things that I know about that can help others.

Acidyo (won't ping you cause you a busy man) posted a very good Curation walkthrough video last week on YouTube. I highly recommend you give it a watch if you want more credible information from a reliable source. Most of what I am going to cover is in his Video but not everything.

The more I think about it, he deserves some love for his efforts so made him a 5% beneficiary of this post.

Author Rewards

I am going to say "Article" in this guide but when I say Article I mean anything posted on Hive, so a Article, a Comment, or even a Snaps/Threads/Waves. It's just easier for me.

Voting High Overview

When you post a article on Hive it lives on the blockchain. And people can 'vote' on it right? When they vote for your article they are taking a portion of their Voting Mana and applying it to your article. What you see if that "someone voted on your post with XXX Hive" right?

Look at this article for example:

In the bottom left corner you see how many people voted on the post and in the bottom right you see the total net worth of all the votes.

Voting Nerd Stats

If you track your nerdy stats like I try to do, you can see that 2 transactions occurred when I voted for that post:

You can even track it further and you can see that my Applied Vote transaction has more details:

This @witness4all account does NOT have a lot of Hive Power so when it votes on a post it doesn't really do anything. It doesn't have enough Weight to make a difference. But if have get enough water drops they will eventually make up a bucket of water!

How much you earn from a post

Let's assume on a post there are no beneficiaries and such and all rewards are set at default. What that means is that the post I screenshotted above with 25.82 in Hive rewards currently, if no other votes came in for it that is the total payout of Article.

That 25.82 Hive will get split a few times.

• 50% will go directly to the author (so 12.91 in Hive)
  • Of that 50% (12.91) it will be split so 50% of it is HP and 50% is HBD.
  • So the author would get 6.455 HP and 6.455 HBD to claim after the 7 days countdown.
• 50% will go to the Curators (more on that in the next section)

7 days? What?

When you post a article it will live and breath on the blockchain FOREVER! But you can not keep earning on that article forever (technically you can, technically 5 years from now you could "tip" a author Hive but that is not using your Voting so we don't mention it here).

You are eligible to earn rewards from voting on your Article for 7 days after you post it. Starting from the exact second you post the article rewards are eligible for the next 168 hours (7 days). After that time has passed 2 things happen.

• No more voting can occur on the post
• The rewards earned from the votes get paid out to the author and curator.

That is when you will see that you are able to claim some rewards. Here is my account on PeakD.

I have 0.002 HP to claim and that is my earnings from posts and such.

Curation Rewards

This has changed some and I may not get it 100% accurate but I will try as best as I can to be 100% correct at least at the time of posting!

Rule of Thumb

The general rule of thumb is that when you vote on a Article you will earn 50% of your vote back as Curation. This is very easy to see. So on that same post, if you hover over the # of voters (NOT the Heart itself) you will see a list of you and the top voters.

If you click on that # of voters though you will see this

This screen will show you everyone who voted on the post and how much their vote put into the Reward Pool but also what percentage of Voting Strength they used.

But what's even more fun is in the top right if you click on the "Basic" slider it will change the visual to be the Advanced Mode!

Which looks like this:

This view gives you way more granular details. It shows you the same list of people and how much their vote added to the Reward Pool. But it also shows you what each user is going to earn in Curation rewards after the 7 days is up.

24 Hour Cutoff

The main important thing to remember though is that those Curation Rewards change dramatically after 24 hours. To get into this we need to find a article that is at least 24 hours old.

Now if we look at the same Voter details and use the Advanced Mode we can see a few things.

Let take a few account and look at them more closely

Account & Vote	Notes:	Curation Percentage
	Louis88 voted on the post 4 hours ago which was past the 24 hour initial window. They added 0.207 to the Reward Pool. They get 0.101 in Curation Rewards.	48 %
	Gadrian voted 6 hours ago and seems to have met the 24/hr cutoff. They added 0.144 to Reward Pool and will get 0.07 in Curation Rewards	50%
	Empis added 0.051 to the Reward Pool and is getting 0.025 in Curation. That is a better percentage because they voted when the article when live	50%

And so everyone else who voted in the initial 24hr period will be getting 50% back of their vote in Curation Rewards.

But what happens to the people who post after 24 hours and where do the missing percentage of Curation Rewards go?

I am glad you asked! For that we are going to look at yet another post to make it clear. This post is 3 days old so we are going to go into the Advanced Mode but also sort the voters by Oldest First.

You can see the Splinterboost account voted with a 50% Vote Weight and added 0.528 Hive into the Reward Pool. But their Curation amount is 0.344. That equals out to 65% of their initial Vote they are getting in Curation Rewards.

How does that work you ask?

Well all of the people who voted AFTER the initial 24 hours do not get 50% of their Vote back in Curation like we saw with Louis88 previously who got 48% back in Curation. That extra 2% that is missing gets distributed to all the voters who voted within the first 24 hours and its proportionate to the voters Vote Weight.

The TLDR is...

If you are ALL about Curation Rewards and want to make the best of your Voting Strength then vote on Articles that were posted in the last 24 hours. Double Points if you Vote on a post that you know WILL be popular and get a lot of votes but vote before the various Curation Trails pick up on it.

If you don't care too much about Curation and care more about the Author of the post then just vote within the first 7 days of a Article being posted.

Telling what is from what

That is all find and dandy but wasn't really what my Discord friend was even asking me. So now we get into that section. I am going to attempt to walk through how to tell where the claimable HP and HBD is coming from when you see that you are able to claim it.

Where did this 0.002 HP come from for example?

There are a few sites I like to look at to check up on and HiveStats is one of them. https://hivestats.io/

When you login to HiveStats it will look something like this:

So you can see that in the last forever I have zero Curation Rewards on my Witness4All account and that is because it has barely any HP so voting is worthless when I can use my Cherokee4Life account to vote. So let's look at that account.

Same Page but for @cherokee4life

We can see that since the start of my account I have earned 2.95HP from Curation. In the last 7 days I earned 0.51 HP.

That seems like small potatoes....

But my account only has ~500HP so the Vote Strength even at 100% is just $0.01. So the 2.95 HP is great for me.

Keep scrolling down HiveStats and you will see 2 sections.

Pending Author Rewards

Pending Curation Rewards

Author Rewards we already talked about so won't get into those. But the Pending Curation Rewards, that is where I will focus.

You can see that the very first line is a Curation Reward that pays out in 8 hours and has a value of 0.01 HP. I voted on that post with 50% Voting Weight but it has a Efficiency of 98.37%.

IF we go to that post and go to Advanced Mode we can see that I my Vote added 0.002 to the Reward Pool but I am getting 0.001 in Curation Rewards.

I know that sounds backwards but since I am so low the #'s get rounded up so it gets tricky. Here look at a Vote that the account bdvoter made.

They added 20.949 Hive to the Reward Pool but are earning 10.659 in Curation Rewards. That is 51% which is more than the 50% they get by default. So everyone that is voting after the 24 hour period is earning less than 50% and people who voted within the first 24 hours are earning more than 50%.

To be VERY clear though. When a post has Hive in it's Reward Pool. Regardless of Curation and all that, the Author will get 50% of the total Reward Pool. Everything about the Curation 24 hour voting and such only effects the other 50% that goes to Curators (fancy name for voters).

Also something I am keen to learn more about as well is when people reblog posts and people vote from that. I know generally how it works but not in details so expect a follow up detailed explanation on that bit as well.

I really wish there was a better cleaner way to see this kind of info in PeakD. Like where it shows you that you have XX amount of HP and HBD to claim. I wish there was a "advanced" section to see how much is Author Reward versus Curation Rewards, but also break down the Curation Rewards as well. Maybe I will just have to add that into my webpage/portal I am working on building :)

Resources

So we already talked about HiveStats: https://hivestats.io/

But I also like HiveHub: https://hivehub.dev/

Hive Now seems to be done right now but I like them as well: https://hive-now.com/