Voting power is determined by how much Steem Power (vesting STEEM) your account has AND how active you've been recently voting. Steem blockchain / network approximates your average voting rate to determine your voting power when you post. Calculation looms like this:
SteemPower / VotesPerDay
Since Steem can't predict how many votes you will cast in the each day, the VotesPerDay calculation is a moving average. Meaning each consecutive vote you make increases your average VotesPerDay. Go 24 hrs without voting then your VotesPerDay will reset to the min value: 20.
You can increase your voting power by posting and voting. 50% of all content and curation rewards are paid out as SteemPower.
The amount of benefit a vote confers on the authors of a post depends upon how many votes are already cast. This is because payout is determined by the following calculation:
NewPayout = (OldVotes + NewVotes)^2
This means that small votes have a much greater absolute benefit when added to a post with a lot of votes, and almost no apparent benefit when added to a post with no votes.
InitialPayout 1 = (0+1)^2
AfterSecondVote 4 = (1+1)^2
The outside observer would think that the second voter counted for "3" even though both voters were of the same weight. The reality is that if a 3rd down vote was cast by an another voter of equal weight the Payout would fall to 1. A fourth voter downvoting would return the payout to 0.
Thanks for clearing my doubts
Sounds sketchy to me lol.
Sketchy or not, I am finding myself in a low steem power situation because I didn't understand how this all worked.
If you're not psycho about up-voting, you'll never realize any of this is happening behind the scenes. At worst, you would simply not get why upvoting someone costed them money / added more than expected / or added less than expected.
Yeah I started noticing my upvotes arent counting for anything. So I guess I better chill on that for a little bit.
Was looking for a post explaining this! Thank you for sharing :)
No problem, I stood on the shoulders of giants...
damn...really?
my vote power right now is about 10%..
what's that tell you about the number of votes I've made?
Been exercising your voting rights, have you?
By the way I resteemed to maybe give those with a good voting score a chance at boosting this post. lol.
I appreciate you. I'll be back. ;)
This is it. Voting power should be watched carerully in start.
I really wish I had found this information before I upvoted everyone, and their mom, for everything and anything to be a good community member and see what would happen...
n00bs...
As I spend more and more time here on Steemit, I come across such useful posts which help clear doubts regarding the new (and weird) terminologies that the world of crypto-currencies has gotten used to.
Thanks for writing this post :)
It's worth pointing out this is a plagiarised post taken from a comment @dantheman made over a year ago here - https://steemit.com/steem/@tuck-fheman/how-is-voting-power-determined-in-steem#@dantheman/re-tuck-fheman-how-is-voting-power-determined-in-steem-20160428t213727572z