A beginners guide to making money discovering quality content before everyone else.
Voting on Posts
Users that have made a multi-year commitment to Steem by converting their STEEM to Steem Power have the ability to vote on posts. The weight of each vote is proportional to how much Steem Power you have divided by the average number of votes you cast in the last 24 hours. If you have cast less than 20 votes in the last 24 hours then 20 will be considered your average.
Rewarding Curation
Steem wants to reward those who sift through the mountains of uncurated posts to find the diamonds before anyone else. Steem has designed its curation reward system to maximize rewards for voting on popular content before it becomes popular. This article will dive into the mechanics of how this is accomplished so that those hoping to game the curation rules to maximize their own rewards can do so.
How it Works
Every time a post gets paid, 50% of the payout is directed toward those who contributed the most to increasing the posts payout. For those who don't care how it works and just want some basic rules to follow, here are some guidelines:
- Only vote on posts that you believe others will also vote for.
- Vote as early as possible after the content is posted.
- Don't vote on content that is already popular
- Acquire as much Steem Power as possible
- Vote for less than 50 posts per day
- Avoid downvoting
The less Steem Power you have the more important it is for you to focus your votes on a
few good posts rather than spreading your vote thin. In particular, users with small amounts
of Steem Power should:
- Vote on content others haven't voted for, to maximize the percentage increase in voting
- Vote on fewer posts, the more you vote the more diluted your Steem Power.
Challenges with Rewarding Voting
The saying "you get what you pay for" has never been more true. In this case Steem must be
"careful what it pays for" or we might not get the result that we want. If Steem simply paid
people for voting then tech-savy individuals could simply vote for everything to maximize
their payout. This type of behavior would add no new information and therefore no value to
the platform. The reward algorithm must be designed to reward information while preventing
gaming and automation.
Reward Percentage Increase in Voting
The algorithm has been carefully designed to minimize the impact of automated voting
algorithms. In particular, we want to reward voting on posts that the network
has the "least information" about. This means that being the first person to vote for
a post gives you the greatest possible curation weight for your Steem Power.
A human has a better chance of predicting the success of a random post with no votes than
a computer algorithm. At best a computer algorithm could use historic performance of the
poster to guess. If an algorithm is used, it will have to be a sophisticated algorithm
that actually does add some value. After all, the algorithm isn't able to vote on everything
and gets exponentially weaker more it dilutes its vote.
Someone who adds 1 vote to a post that already has 99 votes will get a weight of
.01. On the other hand, someone who adds 99 votes to a post that
already has 99 votes will end up with a weight of 25.
The order of voting matters. Given 4 users with 1 vote, and 1 user with 4 votes the
payout received by individual voters can be dramatically different. If the 1 vote
users vote first, then their weights will be:
Vote: 1, 1, 1, 1, 4
Weights: 100, 25, 9, 6, 25
Percent: 60%, 15%, 5%, 3%, 15%
If the order were reversed then the weights would be:
Vote: 4, 1, 1, 1, 1
Weights: 100, 4, 3, 2, 2
Percent: 90%, 3%, 2%, 2%, 2%
Reward Vote Concentration
Human voters can only process so much content per day. A script that votes on everything is
guaranteed to have a much smaller percentage of the winning posts than someone who applies
some human intuition. This vote concentration is rewarded automatically by paying out
rewards based upon percentage increase in total votes (not total payout), with one small caveat: the first voters
can have very large percentage increases with very small stake.
Imagine someone who has 4 accounts with STEEM Power of 1, 2, 3 and 6. If they vote consecutively,
then each vote after the first would see a 50% increase, with the first vote seeing 100%. If we
were to sum the weights based solely on (percent increase)2, the attacker would start out
with 1.75 using this strategy compared to starting out with 1.0 by voting from one account with 12 STEEM Power.
Ideally, it should always be better to vote with 1 account than to divide up your stake and vote
from multiple accounts. To achieve this we multiply the (percent increase)2 by the Steem Power of
the vote. This gives the following vote weights:
Multiple Accounts: 1 + 1 + 1.5 + 3 => 6.5
Single Account: 12
The conclusion is that someone voting with all of their stake at once gets twice the final payout of the same
individual voting multiple times through multiple accounts. It is true that the rich get richer when
viewed from the perspective of an individual post, but when viewed as a whole the playing field is
much more even. Regardless of how rich someone is, they can only evaluate so much content. The rich
individual also has the most to lose from poor voting.
The Math
The network will automatically divide the 50% payout among all users who voted for a post on a
pro-rata basis using the following equation to measure the weight of each voter:
let total_vote_reward = 50% of the content reward
let steem_power = the total Steem Power of the vote
let current_total_steem_power = the combined Steem power of all past votes
let new_total_steem_power = current_total_steem_power + steem_power;
let vote_payout_weight = steem_power * (steem_power/new_total_steem_power)^2
let total_vote_payout_weight = sum vote_payout_weight for all votes on the post
let vote_payout = total_vote_reward * vote_payout_weight / total_vote_payout_weight
Disclaimer
Any numbers or equations presented above are notional and may contain errors. The actual rewards
are defined the by the open source software. It is your responsibility to review the code or hire
someone to review it for you.
Is there a mistake in the example of reward weight calculation?
You wrote:
Vote: 1, 1, 1, 1, 4 Weights: 100, 25, 9, 6, 25 Percent: 60%, 15%, 5%, 3%, 15%shouldn't it be:
Vote: 1, 1, 1, 1, 4 Weights: 100, 25, 11, 6, 100 Percent: 41%, 10%, 5%, 2%, 41%Apparently the first 4 votes from 4 different accounts result in less weight. If it's one vote, the result is
Vote: 4, 4 Weights: 400, 100 Percent: 80%, 20%Looks like it's more beneficial to create a new post rather than reply in others' post? Sounds not too good.
Depends on whether your post will get more traffic on its own than within the proper context. For example, this reply would not be better done as a top-post because it only has value within the context of your post.
Also, if the main article was shared on reddit, facebook, and twitter there will be more traffic and voters in this thread which means you can make more by joining an active discussion than attempting to start a new one.
The only time it make sense to start a new thread is if you have enough to say that is context independent to justify a blog post. I have done this a few times. I create a blog post to reply in detail to a question, then I link to my post in the comments.
Voters will decide whether or not your content is in the proper context.
Thank you for the info.
Based off the info provided i thought i would see where i ranked in the votes on this post... pipped by rainman by 1 minute; damn!. Then i checked the post itself and the result look different.
any thoughts on how au1nethyb1 has vote position #1, despite voting last in terms of the 6 voters depicted?
curation weight depends not just on order, but total Steem Power. @au1nethyb1 had a much larger stake that he voted with.
Of course, I'd also like to understand this - be a good case study to dissect to aid understanding of the OP's post.
Thank you!
so, This post is quite popular and I like it but I shouldn't vote for it if I want my voting power to increase?
Edit : And, what about voting up your own post? What effect does it have on your voting power and the post?
Thank you. Is this still accurate or does it need updating?
Does steemit vote with 100% weight by default (referring to what was said in another post, that I actually have to vote 2000 times to maximize my voting power)?
In fact, you can't re-vote on the same posts!
@svk mentioned that 1% voting issues has been resolved by now. If not,
it will probably be done soonish.
very informative
I downvoted the post not because I disagree with the post or think it is not a quality post but because I do not think that the interests of Steem are served by every platform or devteam update or request for community feedback pulling thousands of dollars from the reward pools that go to ordinary users. The reward consensus algorithm also disproportionately rewards these posts since they are the only thing that 100% of Steem users have in common (aside from being human, etc.).
Are you saying Steem is stealing?
Its like a investing program
More steem power you have,more you get money
good post, thanks
Thank you
Thenks. Good post.
This helped a lot, thank you very much
thank you
Thank you to explain how the curation system works
It's a great post. Thanks.
OMG thanks for this I was so confused on how this works !! You have saved me a ton of trouble moving forward
"users with small amounts of Steem Power" can you be more specific as to how small is small?
I learn alot, thanks! :)
This post is still relevant today
Now i get the system^^ Ty for your post!
Excelente información! te sigo! supoongo que puede tener sus errores, y más desde el tiempo en que lo escribiste, pero es bueno para los que estamos comenzando acá. Saludos.