VOTING & CURATION

I start by saying voting and curation goes hand in hand, the person who votes is also regarded as a curator on the Steem platform.
Steemit is a place where you create contents, post it and get rewarded for them. Just like other things in life, the rewards you get are usually as a result of the quality of the content you post. Now you may be wandering how does someone get rewarded for making posts on Steemit? Where does the rewards come from? Who gives the rewards? These are some of the questions we would keep in mind as we go into writing about voting and curation.
To begin, we have to note that there is a fixed reward pool on Steem, the platform for Steemit.
Users such as you and me vote on quality contents, and this helps in the distribution of rewards from the rewards pool to the Steemians with quality contents. In the same vein, the users who distributed the rewards also get 50 percent of the rewards they distributed. The distribution of rewards by way of voting is greatly influenced by the Steem Power SP that you have. Hence the more Steem Power that a user has, the more rewards a user can distribute from the reward pool. The platform does not require that anybody purchase SP in order to participate, that means you can earn a lot of SP without spending any of your own money, though you have the option of purchasing more Steem Power through your Steemit wallet or through any exchanges that offers Steem pairs such as Poloniex.


There is a concept i will be sharing with you, it is called voting 'mana'. Your voting 'mana' is what allows you to vote. At the start we all handed out 100% of voting 'mana', and every time you vote, you will use a small percent of your voting 'mana'. And as you use more of your voting 'mana', your votes will carry less influence. Therefore a vote with 20% voting 'mana' left would be worth 1/5 as much as a vote cast with 100% voting 'mana'. However, do not be discouraged because the network recharges your voting 'mana' by 20% everyday.
For every vote you cast which is 100%, you have literally used 2% of your remaining voting 'mana'. Since we are allotted 20% of voting 'mana' for each day, you can simply vote 10 or more times per day, but be mindful that as each vote are being cast the votes becomes worthless, and it will take longer to reach full voting 'mana' again.
Now since our voting 'mana' is 100%, i am informing you that this percentage should be shared into 75% for upvotes and 25% for downvotes. As earlier stated for every 100% vote cast, 2% or 1/50th of the voting 'mana' is being used. The same calculation is being used for downvotes but this time you multiply by 4, why? you may ask, simply because the voting 'mana' for downvotes is 25% of the total voting 'mana'. And when your downvotes depletes completely, your remaining voting 'mana' would be used, but in the manner pertaining to downvoting.


As a beginner you can only vote with 100% voting strength, but once you get to 500 SP, you will notice a vote slider appear when you vote. You can use the slider to adjust the weight of your votes, which is between 1% and 100% voting strength. As you decrease the strength of your vote from 100% to less, you would use up less voting 'mana', but it will also make you have less influence on the posts or comments rewards.
Now the rewards are allocated in such a way that 50% of the payout goes to the author of the post or comments, while another 50% goes to the curator or user who votes on the quality post. Of the 50% that goes to the curator, the curator will receive less than 100% if the curator votes within the first 5 minutes. You should also take cognizance of the fact that the split of 50% that the curator receives during the first 5 minutes is calculated linearly based on the time the vote is cast. Therefore if a post is upvoted at the instance of posting, 100% of the curation reward will remain in the rewards pool. When a minute is reached and a user votes, the curator receives 20% while 80% remains in the rewards pool, two minutes reached, the curator receives 40% and 60% remains in the rewards pool. Same technique applies for 3 to 5 minutes. A quick question, how many percent would a curator get at 3, 4, 5 minutes and how many percent would remain in the rewards pool? Please answer in the comment section below. This curation rewards is not limited to votes on posts only, you can also get rewarded for voting comments too.
These curation rewards are only for upvoting posts or comments, you can't get rewards for downvoting posts or comments, since downvoting reduces rewards on a posts or comment.
Users are allowed to downvote for any reason that they want. There are many users in the community who recommend only using the downvote on posts that are abusive. It is up to you if you want to follow this etiquette. Just because you received a downvote does not mean that you did something wrong. The person who downvoted you may have done so in other to reallocate the rewards in a way that they felt was more beneficial to the other active posts in the platform. Sometimes users will leave a comment explaining why they downvoted. In case they left a reason you can try to decipher if you did anything wrong, and see if there is anything you want to change.


There is another concept i would be writing about and that is called curation trails. What are Curation Trails? They are generally regarded as people who automatically vote on a content after a user has voted on it. This is usually done because some users have a sense of following the votes of users who are good at curating. Some users decides to use third party applications such as Steemauto to automatically cast votes, users can use this tool to automatically vote for the same posts and comments that other users does.

WITNESSES

Witnesses are scheduled on the Steem blockchain to produce a new block every 3 seconds. For this fact, 21 witness nodes produces 21 blocks in each 63-second round.
What is the function of the Steem witness? This is a question on our minds. The Steem blockchain by default requires a set of people to create blocks and this is achieved using a consensus mechanism called delegated proof of stake, DPOS. The community elects 'witnesses' to act as the block producers and governance body for the network. There are 20 full-time witnesses, producing a block every 63-second round. A 21st position is shared by the backup witnesses, who are scheduled proportionally to the amount of stake-weighted community approval they have. Such witnesses are compensated for each block they create with Steem Power SP.
You can vote up to 30 witnesses and since Steem blockchain is based on DPOS, the more SP you have the more weight on your vote to push the witness up in the rank of the 21 witnesses.

COMMUNITY

What is a community? is a question you might ask. It can be defined as

1. a group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.
2. the condition of having certain attitudes and interests in common.
   Source - google dictionary
   This is important to know because according to the definitions above we need to have a specific condition or characteristic to align with them. As a perfect example #Newcomers-community, which was created by @cmp2020 for newcomers alike in the Steemit platform, helps newcomers to get started and have a solid foundation of what happens or can happen in the Steemit arena.
   Currently there are so many active communities that you can navigate around and see if any one that catches your interest have a community description and interest that aligns with yours.
   Here is a list of active communities on steemit and what they are about:

• WhereIN - Mobile apps
• Banking and Finance - Banking and Finance
• Steeming Curators - Challenges and Promotion of Steem
• PopularStem - Science, math, engineering
• ART - Arts
• Symbionts - Latinos
• Steem Africa - Steem Africa
• Steem Bangladesh - Steem Bangladesh
• Steeming India - Steem India
• INVEN Gaming - Gaming community
  This is just a few but the list is not limited to these. Go ahead and find out other communities and check for the ones or twos that aligns with you.
  Please comment in comment section below to let me know which other ones exist, which one you chose and why?
  Please make sure to read the community descriptions or rules of the community to avoid being muted or banned from the communty.
  Note also that you can create your own community, that's how powerful and wonderful this steemit platform is. This a guide on how to create a community on Steemit!

Thank you all for staying tuned to this post.