It's been ~2 months since the introduction of flat curation on LeoFinance. The flat curation curve evens out the playing field for all curators and removes the ability for autovoting bots to frontrun manual curators.

This change has drastically increased the profitability of staking LEO for the majority of our users. It has also removed the incentive to use autovoters for enhanced profit - now the only incentive for autovoting is to save time as opposed to frontrun curators who are manually upvoting posts and bringing value to the ecosystem.

Since the change, many of our curators have moved over to manual upvoting. Many have also started upvoting comments and engagement has subsequently skyrocketed on https://LeoFinance.io. To sum it up, this change has been incredibly positive for our platform and community.

This report comes highly requested from the community. Each month, we do an "Author Reward Leaderboard" post to show the top authors on LeoFinance. This report will run the same type of report but instead look at the Curators.

Curating content (upvoting other user content) is one of the most valuable activities you could do on the LeoFinance platform. LEO runs on a proof-of-stake based decentralized upvote economy which means that the LEO stakeholders (users who stake LEO in their wallet) decide who earns rewards by upvoting them.

In this report, we will rank LeoFinance's top curators by the following data:

Curation rewards earnings
Number of votes cast
Number of unique authors voted
Votes diversification

This data will give us a multi-faceted look at how the top curators perform by examining curators based on earnings, the size of the votes they cast (vote weight), the diversity with which they upvote authors and how equal their distribution is amongst those they upvote.

The data presented here is for the period October 16th - November 16th, 2020.

Top 20 LEO Curators by Earnings

As the largest LEO stakeholder on the platform, @onealfa.leo is the obvious leader of the pack with more than 10,000 LEO ($2,700+ USD) earned this month from curation alone. This is due to the sheer size of his stake relative to other curators.

In second place is @taskmaster4450le who also holds a significant stake in the platform followed by @dtrade and @rollandthomas.

Obviously @onealfa.leo is on the top with more than 10k LEO earrings from curation rewards. Its no surprise having in mind the size of his stake 😊. @taskmaster4450le is on the second place followed by @dtrade and @rollandthomas.

This chart is also clearly not the best indicator of who is a great curator. With our flat curation curve, this is basically just a chart of the top 20 stakeholders who actively curate - since the rewards distribution on LEO is based on how much you have staked and unlike HIVE and other Hive-based tokens it is NOT based on frontrunning other curators. This is why we've included other aspects of the curation game in this report to rank the top curators.

_{Note on the data from @dalz: I have pooled the data from Hive Engine but there were some bugs on a few accounts that I have noticed myself and corrected manually. The data presented here might not be a 100% accurate, but it’s a great indicator.}

Number of votes from the top 20 curators

Amazing @onealfa.leo is on the top here as well with more than 5k votes. @taskmaster4450le on the second spot with almost 3k votes. @oakshieldholding on the third place with 2.7k votes in the period.

Onealfa is undoubtedly one of the best whales you could ask for on a platform. Not only does he hold the largest amount of LEO staked, but he also has the most diverse upvoting activity. He loves to reward engagement on the platform which is why his number of votes cast is so incredibly high.

Keep in mind that more than 95% of @onealfa.leo's upvotes are done manually. He doesn't use an autovoter most of the time so he has manually cast over 5,000 votes in the past month. What a beast.

The key to getting a Onealfa "mark of the beast" - as he likes to call his upvotes on comments - is to be a consistently engaged user of the platform. Onealfa is always lurking out there in the comment section of posts on https://leofinance.io. If he sees you engaging regularly, then he'll likely give you some of that 🦁 love.

@taskmaster4450le is another great whale on the platform. As one of the most engaged commenters and curators, he's also spreading his votes far and wide on users he sees that consistently post and comment on other user content.

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. Afterall, one user could game # of votes by simply voting a handful of authors with a low % very frequently.

This next chart adds another perspective to this by showing the unique acccounts upvoted by the top curators:

Again @onealfa.leo is leading the pack. As I said - he's looking for engaged users on the platform and isn't afraid to spread his vote out to a wide number of unique authors/commenters.

A total of 663 authors were voted in this period. @oakshieldholding is the second most diverse curator, followed closely by @taskmaster4450le.

Votes Diversification

To see how truly diversified the voting of our top curators is we will need to dig a bit deeper.

We have seen the number of accounts voted from the top curators. But 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.

To check how the top curators are casting their votes between the accounts voted, we will be using the standard deviation in the rewards given out from each of the top curators.

@dalz - I have done a similar report on the top Hive curators. The issue with Hive is the curve and voting window which makes the number of accounts voted and weight on them a less than ideal metric. With LEO's flat curation curve, this method makes a lot more sense and brings relevant data to the forefront.

A low standard deviation indicates that the votes are distributed more equally. The opposite, a high standard deviation indicates that the votes are distributed unequally between the accounts.

Here are the top curators ranked by Standard Deviation:

Rank	Curator	Standard deviation
1	oldtimer	0.37%
2	taskmaster4450le	0.51%
3	mindtrap-leo	0.52%
4	oakshieldholding	0.54%
5	onealfa.leo	0.55%
6	empoderat.leo	0.63%
7	trumpman2	0.76%
8	themightyvolcano	0.97%
9	megavest	0.99%
10	tbnfl4sun	0.99%
11	edicted	1.18%
12	forexbrokr	1.20%
13	phython	1.21%
14	rollandthomas	1.38%
15	dtrade	1.44%
16	dalz1	1.79%
17	brofund-leo	2.13%
18	pouchon.tribes	2.18%
19	leovoter	2.33%
20	partitura.leo	7.15%

^{(remember: a lower standard deviation = a more equal vote distribution)}

@oldtimer ranks #1 for this metric. His votes are the most equally distributed between the authors he votes on.

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

The loveable whale, @onealfa.leo ranks #1! He does an amazing job curating on the platform and also happens to have the largest stake. Dedication to curation isn't just a selfishly profitable game, it's also plays a key role in widening the distribution of LEOs to a wider group of users who are active on the platform and working hard to make it more valuable.

@oldtimer takes second place, quite close to the top because of his equal distribution of votes. @taskmaster5540le ranks in third place.

Final Note

The long debated topic on Hive - what is good curation and quality content? - has been solved to a great degree by LeoFinance. Having a niche community with focused content, engaged users and stakeholders that truly believe in widening the distribution and growing the platform makes holding LEO as staked LEO (a.k.a. LEO POWER) an extremely valuable and rewarding activity.

The rankings above should serve as valuable metrics in showing how the top curators are performing in terms of distributing the LEO token to as many good authors/commenters as possible. The distribution of stake on Hive has been long debated and many have tracked the flow of stake as they try to see if new HIVE is entering a wider distribution of accounts.

With LeoFinance, we've seen a continual widening in the distribution of LEO. Our stakeholders and top curators do an amazing job of spreading stake out to new, engaged and consistent authors/commenters on the platform. This report confirms all of that.

The above is not necessarily a metric for discovering and rewarding quality content. The debate around what is and isn't quality content will be a never ending one because of the subjectivity around quality. With LeoFinance, we all have an idea of what kind of content we like to see and also what kind of engagement we expect from our hardcore users.

It's clear from this report that the community and top stakeholders support users who consistently create content and engage with other user content regularly. If you want to be successful on a platform like LeoFinance, then engagement is 90% of the game.

If our final goal is to increase ad revenues - as one example - to burn tokens and ultimately increase the intrinsic value of LEO based on revenue generated, then the criteria for "quality content" would be based on the traffic that any given piece of content/comment section brings to the platform. That being said, not everyone will agree with only chasing after traffic.

In December, LeoFinance is rolling out our new Microblogging integration to https://leofinance.io. With this in mind, you can see that the platform is undergoing a radical shift in how users are rewarded. Writing the longest piece of content isn't necessarily the best way to earn LEO rewards. Instead, the stakeholders will be focused on users who add value through engagement and the "time on site" metrics.

For example, creating a post and engaging with 50 people in the comment section is likely to be even more valuable than someone writing a 10,000 word article and not engaging with the comments at all. The debate around this is healthy and will likely go on forever. Our goal is to give our users as many possible ways to engage on the platform and gain value from the content they create/read/interact with.

The main point from the above is that ranking curators can be looked at from more than one angle depending on what the final goals are. From a token distribution perspective, the top LEO curators have done an amazing job. Although there is always a space for improving, especially for some (note to self 😊).

Report by @dalz, co-written by Khal

LeoFinance is a blockchain-based social media community for Crypto & Finance content creators. Our tokenized app allows users and creators to engage and share content on the blockchain while earning cryptocurrency rewards.

_{**Follow @leofinance for official updates**}

Posted Using LeoFinance ^Beta