Hello everyone, I’m here to complete the achievement 6 task. Even though it hasn’t been easy for me due to exams and school stress. I want to thank @cryptokannon for his post which guided me in completing mine, it helped me understand how curation and voting works.

HOW VOTING AND CURATION WORKS ON STEEMIT

Both voting and curation are interconnected in the senses that curation is usually initiated by voting on contents that are deserving. Just like other social media sites, steemit gives its users the opportunity to appreciate other people’s contents by voting.

This tool is found in the picture above.

Immediately you vote for a post by clicking the green arrow pointing upwards in the picture above you can start to distribute the rewards coming from the reward pool to the author/creator of the content in question.

NOTE:

• Whatever reward to be distributed depends on the steem power you have at that moment.

• Whatever ability you have to cast votes and influence rewards also depends on the voting mana you possess currently.

  The voting mana is usually set at 100%, it then deducts 2% when a vote is cast at a full power of 100%

NOTE:

• It recharges by 20% daily, so this means that users have to wait for it to recharge once theirs is exhausted.
• The voting mana determines the amount of power or influence you have on the reward distribution.

As a newbie, I’m only permitted to vote at a 100% voting strength. But then there are users who have at least 500 steem power who can adjust their voting strength (which is between 1% - 100%), this happens as an adjustment bar shows up.
This feature enables the user to either increase or decrease their voting strength as they like.
It’s also important to note that there is a mana for downvotes which is like 25% of the upvote mana.

NOTE:

• Downvotes do not earn you any curation rewards!!!!

Now for you to check your remaining voting mana, you’re supposed to use a third party tool like https://steemscan.com/ and https://steemworld.org/ .
The allocation of rewards happens in such a way that 50% of it goes to the author of the post while the other 50% goes to the curator. But sometimes, the time of vote is a very important factor here.
It works like this - Once a post is made, 100% of the curation rewards still remains inside the pool when the curator votes at the moment of posting.

WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU VOTE FOR A POST BEFORE 5 MINUTES MARK AFTER POSTING

The table below shows what happens as time progresses:

Time	Curator Rewards	Reward going to the pool
After a minute mark	20%	80%
Two minutes	40%	60%
Three minutes	60%	40%
Four minutes	80%	20%
Five minutes	100%	0%

After seeing this table, you’ll now understand that the curator benefits 100% of the rewards after 5 minutes of making a post.

WHO WILL YOU VOTE FOR STEEM WITNESS AND WHY?

It is a fact that the steemit blockchain is built entirely on the basis of voting and curating posts, even though it’s not mandatory to vote or curate on a post but quality content created on this platform needs to be voted on or curated.
The steemit platform is designed in a such a way that after every 3 seconds, new blocks are created. This creation of new blocks is done by witnesses. The witness are paid with steem power for every new block they create.
According to what I’ve noticed, I would vote for @justyy and @steemchiller . These two have really put in commendable effort to create tools that help and make the steemit platform very simple to use, understand and comprehend. These two are worthy of my support.

WHY I CHOOSE TO JOIN COMMUNITIES

When I joined this platform newly I was actually suprised at the amount of communities here. There are so many of them but after going through most of them I chose to join a few. My reasons are;

1. Newcomers’ Community;
   Why i chose to join this community is to have access to all my achievement tasks which would help me stay on steemit
2. SteemitCryptoAcademy;
   This community teaches me and helps me learn about cryptocurrencies. It also teaches me how to trade with cryptocurrencies as well.
3. Steeming Curators;
   This is so I wouldn’t have an excuse of missing out on any challenge.
4. PromoSteem community;
   This community deals with whatever is related to promotion of steem which is actually fun.

To the attention of @cryptokannon @sarkodieeric1 @awesononso .
Thank you for reading!