Another reason to invest your earnings back into Steemit is for voting power.
At 15 SP (the number Steemit will keep you at if you haven’t invested), you have virtually no voting power. Your first couple of votes of the day are worth a penny, but after a couple of upvotes, they become completely worthless.
This is one major reason why upvote exchanges (upvote for upvote) make no sense. Sure, I can give you all the votes I like, but you will get nothing from them! This isn’t the “like” button on Facebook where we can be pretty liberal with hitting “like” - as a way of saying “yep” or “I read it” or many things. Steemit isn’t like that. If you want to make a comment, COMMENT! You don’t have a limit of those (except if your bandwidth is negative – see yesterday’s post on bandwidth.)
Just as with bandwidth, I was given the standard line about how voting power refreshes. It's a certain amount of time and very linear - as in, you get a certain number of votes (per day) at certain voting power values. My observations have said something a little different. Here is what I found this week, writing down how many votes I could bestow at different times. (My votes are still only worth a penny.)
When I'm below about 70% voting power, I might get a single upvote at a penny, but that's it.
At about 80% I get about 2 to 3 upvotes at a penny. (I end at around 75% voting power.)
At 100%, I can get 4 or 5 upvotes. (I end at around 90% voting power.)
So, you can see it's not exactly a linear equation.
Now, here's the fun part... you don't have to wait until tomorrow. I haven't worked out what the magic number is for refreshing your upvote quota (according to your current voting power), but 6 hours after I did the 4 votes at 100% (fifth was worth nothing), I was able to give out 3 more votes (at 95% when I started those.)
Just keep an eye on what you're contributing. Also, if someone has retracted their vote as you vote, you will see weird things - such as the value going down! I used to think that was due to you voting too many times, but I now think that is just a fluke, that you voted at the same time as someone else retracted theirs. The reason I think this is because last time that seemed to happen with me, I voted another time on another post and gave my penny again... therefore, the loss of value on the other post had nothing to do with me!
Again, keeping an eye on Steemed can really enlighten you!
I'm fairly certain that as I have increased in SP my voting power refreshes more quickly. So, I can vote more frequently.
(From a curation point of view, you should be using your votes up as often as you can! That's a topic for another part of this series!)
Anyway, as you get more and more voting power, not only will your votes become worth more, but you will start having a say in how much of your voting power you use at once. This makes your vote worth more, but will reduce the number you can use. Or you can vote more times for less… the choice is yours (which really is cool!) I don't know what the magic number is for this, perhaps one of my readers can enlighten me about that.
As we discussed yesterday, voting power also increases your precedence for bandwidth, which really is helpful.
15 SP was a crippling level, the morning was impossible for posting, simply because I didn't have precedence. As I passed 20 SP again, it became more manageable. Passing 30 SP has made even more difference. Even at 50 SP, I understand I'm not completely out of the woods yet, but I haven't had any bandwidth issues for over a month now!
I also described in yesterday’s post how to power up to get your Steem Power increased, so refer to that article if you are stumped on how to get your voting power increased.
Next, I plan to tackle curation. It was still fairly fuzzy to me a month ago - that's why I didn't do that article. But now, I feel I have a much better understanding of it - and try to plan my votes appropriately so that I might start getting a bit more out of them! (And it has been working, to a degree.)
Thanks for listening. Tell me how I've helped you in the comments.
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Lori Aberle Hopkins – photographer at Viking Visual, author, student-of-the-world.
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