The upvote calculator shows the current value of an upvote calculated to 5 digits. I have 157 SP, my upvote is currently worth $0.0014. It takes 8 of my votes to add up to a penny.
The upvote of an account with 15 SP is worth just 0.0001 . It takes 100 upvotes to add up to a penny.
To avoid Steem Dust, small accounts should only upvote posts that already have votes and have a value over $0.02 .
You can join @dustsweeper by transferring SBD to @dustsweeper. So lets say you sent him $0.10, dusty will give ten upvotes worth $0.02. You will get your money back plus the amount of the dust.
The service @dustbunny does the same thing. You have to join dustbunny through the author's discord channel. I joined Dust Sweeper. Dusty has swept up $1.63 of dust on my account so far.
Thank you for your comment and the information.
Hi @yintercept
I missed this comment,
Thank you for a good comment and for providing good information to new members!
I will send you a Tip!
I also suggest the small accounts focus on comments because the rewards are split between commenter and author.
Small accounts should engage people with comments. However, they should avoid upvoting comments. Were I to upvote your comment above, the upvote would be swept away as dust.
If a small account wants to reward someone for a recent comment, they should upvote an active root post in the account.
One thing to consider is the 50/50 split for curation/author, in otherwords if you upvote a post you will share 50% of the reward for the post. But you compete with everyone else who upvotes a post and the shares are distributed according to 1. How early you vote (the closer you vote to give minutes after the post is published the greater your reward, 2. Your SteemPower: the higher your SteemPower the greater your share, although the magnifying effect of early voting helps smaller accounts and reputation. It is because of this competition that I recommend upvoting comments even if your vote is less then 2 cents, IF the comment gets more then 4 cents, so you share is greater then 2 cents and doesn’t get blown away as dust.
I upvoted your comment. According to the upvote calculator my upvote is worth $0.0043. @vagabondspirit upvoted as well. His upvote is worth $0.0008 for a total of $0.0051 .
That half of a penny is doomed to be wiped away as dust unless someone upvotes it with another penny and a half worth of upvote power.
You could save the dust with a self vote or dusty might save it for you. Either way, you are creating white noise on the blockchain.
As an account in the plankton, I've realized that my upvotes are best spent on root posts. Since I don't have sufficient SP; the upvotes I put on your comment simply created a dilemma for you.
Small accounts should engage in comments. They simply should not upvote comments that are likely to be below the dust threshold even when the comments are insightful.
I agree with prioritization of comments. Engagement is very important.