Currently the threshold for the vote slider to appear is 1 MV of STEEM POWER, or around 500 SP. After this, users can set their vote strength between 1-100%.
Now that hardfork 19 is in effect, user votes are up to 4 times as strong. I submitted a pull request to make the requirements for the vote slider 1/4 as high. This means it would only require 0.25 MV of SP (or around 125 STEEM POWER) to be able to use the slider.
I did tests with a user that had 120 SP (a little less that .25 MV), and they were able to upvote some posts with 1%, while near full voting power. After they have depleted some of their voting power they will start to get a "Voting weight is too small, please accumulate more voting power or steem power." error.
Once they reach that point, they can either increase their voting weight to 2% and continue voting, or buy more SP. They can continue with 2% votes until they get to around 50% voting power and then they will need to up their weight to 3%.. Of course, they still have the option to do higher weighted votes (including 100%).
I think lowering the limit to 125 SP will give new users an easier target to aim for, to incentivize them to buy/earn more SP. It will also allow them to spread their votes out more if they don't want to use up all their voting power quickly.
The pull request can be viewed here:
https://github.com/steemit/condenser/pull/1511
The PR is not accepted yet, but I plan to work with Steemit, Inc. to make any edits necessary to get it approved. Hopefully we will see the changes up on the live site soon!
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