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One of the ways to boost your Hive rewards is to follow curation trails. This guide will walk you through the steps to following the Ecency curation trail. I'll keep it simple, so pull up a chair and let's dive in!

What Is a Curation Trail?

First, let's talk about what is a curation trail. A curation trail is a useful tool that can be used to find great content on the Hive blockchain. Essentially, a curator launches a curation trail and upvotes useful content on the blockchain. Followers of the curation trail automatically upvote the same content based on a few pre-selected parameters.

There are hundreds of curation trails on the Hive blockchain and anyone can launch one. Not all of them, however, are worth following.

Some of the best curation trails to follow on the Hive blockchain, in my humble opinion, are the following:

• @ecency
• @curie
• @qurator
• @ocd
• @leo-voter

That begs the question, what makes a curation trail worth following? What makes a good curation trail?

A good curation trail contains the following features:

• A good reputation based on its ability to highlight great content on the Hive blockchain. In other words, it routinely finds the best high-quality content while filtering out bad content, bots, spam, plagiarism, and other low-quality content.
• It is manually curated as opposed to curated by bots or automation.
• Returns excellent rewards for those who follow the curation trail

These are the top three criteria I use for judging curation trails. That isn't to say that automated curation trails are always bad or of lesser quality. In my opinion, however, manually curated trails using humans for the curation, or at least for reviewing content before upvoting, more consistently highlight the best content. This, of course, is in keeping with the principle that quality is subjective with one caveat: That bad content is more easily identifiable and very often falls into one of three categories ... spam, automated, or plagiarized.

While quality is subjective, most Hivians will agree that spam and plagiarized content are low quality. Regarding automated content, there can be a range of opinions, and a debate on whether it is appropriate on the blockchain is worth having. Nevertheless, automated content is more likely to return spam or plagiarized content unless it is reviewed by humans for quality.

What Is Ecency?

Ecency is a Hive front end that allows anyone to post to the Hive blockchain using the Ecency app or domain interface. It was launched by @good-karma on the Steem blockchain in 2016 and migrated to Hive when Hive forked from Steem in 2020.

As a standalone social network, Ecency offers some unique and useful features including:

• A Hive blockchain wallet
• Censorship-resistance technology
• Ecency Decks, a dapp that allows the user to see multiple feeds side-by-side similar to Tweetdeck for Twitter
• Ecency Waves, a short-form content publishing dapp similar to Twitter (now known as X)

Ecency has become one of the most popular dapps on the Hive blockchain. Users earn Hive and HBD as other users interact with their content. Users can also earn Ecency Points, which can be used to promote one's posts to achieve higher payouts.

While Ecency is a dapp on the Hive blockchain, the Ecency curation trail is a separate entity owned and managed by the Ecency team. Next, I'll tell you how to follow the curation trail.

How to Follow the Ecency Curation Trail

To join the Ecency curation trail, you'll need to go to Hive.Vote and create an account. That's a very simple process that involves using your Hive username and Hivesigner as the account authenticator.

Once inside Hive.Vote, on the left side of the screen you'll see a navigation menu. Click on "Curation Trail".

On that screen, there are two sections. The first section shows the curation trails you are following. If you have not followed any curation trails, that section will be empty. The section below it lists popular curation trails on the Hive blockchain. Scroll down until you find the Ecency curation trail. Click the blue button labeled "FOLLOW".

Alternatively, you can use the search feature to find the Ecency curation trail by typing "Ecency" into the search field and clicking Search.

Once you've followed the curation trail, you'll need to click on the button labeled "Settings" and establish your curation trail voting criteria. You can elect to vote for comments as well as original posts, but keep in mind that the more often you vote on the Hive blockchain the more Resource Credits you use. So, if you are a new user or you have limited Resource Credits, you shouldn't elect to vote for comments.

You want to ensure there is a checkmark beside "Enable (uncheck for disabling)"

Under Voting Weight, elect to vote by scale or fixed voting weight. Here's the difference:

• Fixed voting weight means you vote the exact percentage of your upvote that you specify. For example, if you elect to upvote curated posts 50% of your available upvote value, every vote you cast on curated content will be vote at 50% voting weight.
• Scaled voting means your voting weight is determined by the Ecency curation trail's voting weight. In essence, your voting weight will be equal to your designated voting weight times Ecency's voting weight. For instance, if Ecency upvotes content at 50% voting weight and and you set your voting weight to 20%, then your follow-up vote on each piece of curated content will be 20% of Ecency's vote. In other words, 20% of 50 %, which is 10%.

When in doubt, choose scaled as that will preserve your Resource Credits.

Finally, in your settings, you can choose how many minutes to wait before you cast your vote. The further down the line you vote, the less percentage you may receive of the final value of all votes on a piece of content. However, your percentage of the final value of the post is also determined by your voting weight, so don't spend a lot of time analyzing how long to wait before casting your vote. I set most of mine to 0.

At certain times, you may want to pause a curation trail. That option is available at Hive.Vote. Just log into your account, find the Ecency curation trail under the "trails you are following" section, and change your settings. It's really that simple.

I hope that you've found this guide useful. If so, please consider giving it an upvote, and follow me for more useful tips.