![burnmoney.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmPXpf1WbTennzg1ow6qjuR8CET1S6X27xm5EXMQrh4f7i/burnmoney.png) OK, most of you guys may have noticed that the "potential payout" keeps dropping and dropping over the period of time between post creation and reward payout. That is mainly because of the rapidly decreasing STEEM reward pool. @aggroed did a good post about that I have seen rewards dropping as much as 30% within the 7 days time frame. First I thought it´s because of the STEEM price dropping, but now as STEEM is stable and the rewards still keep dropping I searched for the real answer. And the answer is the decreasing reward pool. So I started monitoring some of my posts. This one started off with 75$ and is now below 60$ with 2 more days to go until payout. Within the last 14 hours there was a plus of 1 Vote and a minus of 1.07$ You may want to do the calculations for yourself... ![vergleich.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmZ1BJDqNpTHUJwgYJesZWKzMWV28pQZ3oX93aqQMCquPP/vergleich.jpg) Now let´s start using our brain for a second. ![randopic.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmVzKVfbRLSWAjvCzAjd8DSSQvU4jP2inFUUfQDTxC4ViU/randopic.png) If you can not help yourself but using one of the whale voting bots e.g. @randowhale or @booster for increasing your post payout - please do yourself a favor and use them within the last hours before voting closes. Do not use them shortly after the post was created. Time will eat your profits, if you are able to even get some with a low percantage vote. Some people use randowhale to get into trending section, but i fairly doubt that rando is able to boost you into that category with a 1.9% rando vote ... Furthermore I doubt that someone is reading the trending section.

Attention: Do not use whale voting bots within the last 12 hours before payout - voting is not possible within that timeframe

![rando1self.png](https://steemitimages.com/DQmTSCvbPsdkCf6YGETrnEhEj6eCnHxAfJW6awNmdehhKCF/rando1self.png) As you can see I got a plus of 2.39$ potential payout for a 1.6% vote from @randowhale we have to subtract the curator rewards and the payout decrease for the last 24hours ... so randowhale is actually not giving profit if you get a vote below 3%

So be smart and don´t burn your money

comments and discussion appreciated ![SIGNATUR.gif](https://steemitimages.com/DQmcGTgE9ztQ7QmWESyE7uVqLrUqfbAa1fsTCod6dmsFYjP/SIGNATUR.gif)