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.)
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.
I could be wrong, but as I've increased in SP again, it seems that the voting power starts to refresh faster as well.
Steemd is a great way of monitoring your voting power and how you're doing at any point. If you're below about 80% power (at least in the beginning), you're not giving any money. Yet, my observations don't quite support the standard understanding of this. I can be at 95% and put out 5 of my penny votes and that's it. I can also be at 80% and give out a few... Once I'm down to 65%, even the first vote isn't likely to be worth anything. Watch how it goes... if your vote doesn't increase the value of the post (or worse, makes it go down!) then it's time to lay off for a couple of hours.
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. I understand I'm not completely out of the woods now, but I haven't had any bandwidth issues for a couple of weeks 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.
Finally, 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!
Thanks for listening. Tell me how I've helped you in the comments.
Found: Wikipedia Commons, with reuse license.
source and author: Steemit.com
Lori Aberle Hopkins – photographer at Viking Visual, author, student-of-the-world.
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