If you, like me, have been posting daily, really putting thought and effort into your posts, and getting excited when you see them start to get upvoted, only to have that excitement dissipate when you notice that the numbers by the dollar sign don't seem to go up with your vote count, you're not alone. The fact is, the way the Steemit system is set up means that, at the moment, votes don't necessarily correlate to payout.

The current situation

There's a simple reason for this, which, if you've paid attention to the way the system works, should be obvious. The financial weight that votes carry are dependant on the Steem Power held by the voter. The more Steem Power in the voter's wallet, the more money will be attached to their vote. That means you can have dozens or even hundreds of votes on your post, but if the majority of voters have very little Steem Power, you won't see much financial gain as a result.

My condolences

It works the other way too. If you've been wondering what the deal is with all this marine life (particularly whales and dolphins) that everyone's talking about, these are the people with lots of Steem Power - the ones with the greatest ability to make a post's value go up simply through the power of their vote. In the case of whales, these are generally people who joined Steemit very early (such as founders Hive account@dan and Hive account@ned), those who bought a lot of Steem on the market, or the lucky few who have made thousands on their posts. One vote from a whale is all it can take to add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to your post. Of course, most whales understand that with great power comes great responsibility, and won't upvote just anything - you have to impress them with good content!

A suitably impressed whale

The good news

At the moment, with Steemit still being in its infancy, and with the currently high influx of new users joining every day, the ratio of whales and dolphins to minnows (those with little to no Steem Power) is very low, meaning that very few people have the necessary Steem Power to really increase payouts on posts by upvoting. The good news, however, is that this ratio will increase as more new users start to accumulate Steem Power. This means that, as time goes by, more users will have the ability to increase payouts significantly with their vote, and the ability to make money off posting quality content will not be so dependant on a chance encounter with a whale, but will become more democratic instead. Eventually, we should see a higher correlation between vote count and payout - which means more Steem for everyone! So don't despair if you're not seeing the money yet - keep posting, curating, and contributing to the network, and you'll doubtless see the benefits in the future.