This Changes Everything: What I Learned About Voting Power
I am a noob
I apologize if this is common knowledge to the rest of you out there. I just learned this. I thought that voting for things was harmless. Well, it kinda is if you have your steem power delegated to you and every vote you make nets $0.00. Then, yeah, your votes are harmless.
Delegation
Add some steem power (that you pay for yourself), and you lose your delegation. What's delegation? That's steem lending you a hand because without enough SP, you really can't do anything at all. Once you build up your own SP, then you don't need the delegation anymore, so you can wave goodbye to it. I've seen people with SP delegated after having lots of SP already. I have no idea how this is possible. Still a noob.
steemdollar.com
I learned from Steem Dollar how much my voting power is.
Voting Effectiveness
I also learned that with each vote, your voting power drops. It doesn't drop by very much. It is slight. Keep in mind that how much it drops is actually proportionate to how much voting effectiveness you apply. It's possible to reduce the amount of voting effective ness you apply on some sites. On steemit, it's at 100% no matter what. Some other sites like D.tube have a slider where you can adjust your voting effectiveness. The more effectiveness you use, the more your voting power will drop. You can actually use negative effectiveness. This also will drop your voting power. Negative effectiveness is essentially a down-vote.
0% Effectiveness
It is possible to have 0% effectiveness and still have a positive or negative vote. There are $0 rewards from this though. The only reason I would see that anyone would want to do this is to give an up/down vote without impacting in anyway at all. Just for the sake of saying yay/nay.
Recovering Effectiveness
You recover 20% of your effectiveness/day. At the time of writing this, I'm at 29.22% effectiveness. This means that tomorrow, I'll be at 49.22%. Furthermore, I think that the rate at which you recover your effectiveness is actually hourly. I'm not sure about that, but I have been watching my effectiveness intently, and I've notice it does go up periodically. It may be for other reasons though. Again, noob.
Change in Strategy
This was a huge game changer for me to realize this. Like I said before, I was just upvoting anything I liked. I didn't even have to like it a lot. Now that I know my votes aren't just worth a few pennies to other people, I will be more careful. I know now that my votes actually have value that can go down if I use them too much. I should be more selective about where I use it. The trouble with this though is that this forces me to abide by other rules:
- I want to give priority to my own posts. That is, I will probably save my most powerful upvote for myself
- Since I recover 20% effectiveness in a day, I will try not to go beyond that.
- I will try to space out my posts, so that I can get the most out of my own vote. Maybe not once per day, but if I post twice in a day, I will probably go a day without posting. I mean, that's the only vote I can really count on. I might as well make it count the most possible.
- I'll opt out of automatically upvoting my posts. I'll wait to upvote them.
Am I doing it wrong?
If anyone out there knows a better way, let me know. I'm eager to learn and I do want to contribute to the community in a positive way.
This is interesting. Why give my votes (and my money) to someone else instead to selfish vote myself (and give my money to me)? Seems fine, after all it's my money.
The powerful thing (I think) it's that on streemit "you can very easily" vote someone else, and at the same time give him a small amount of your money, only with a click. (for example this is impossible on youtube or facebook).
And more in depth, this "small" feature it's not small at all, but very important for the ecology of the community. It benefits all partecipants and can be fast and huge: for example if a smart whale find superinteresting something posted by a fish, with a little click can decide to approve, vote, and pump a lot the little fish, without even noticing the difference for himself. So this little but important and smart fish posting big content can rapidly grow and became another smart whale... finding and voting another small fish, and so on. ;)
By the way, I'm a little fish, but I find your post interesting and I will give it a vote (why not? After all it cost me almost nothing lol).
PS: I vote also because I think that you're smart, onest, and not selfish at all! ;)
Thanks @wellwell. Are you being sarcastic? I can't tell. Your point is well put. Let's not be selfish. I wholeheartedly agree that we should vote for other people's stuff. I should probably clarify or emphasize less on who to vote for and more on the quality of the content.
Of course, we all are going to assume our own content is worthy of a vote. I mean, if you don't think your post is worth even your own vote, why are you posting it? Therefore, your vote should probably come first, right?
Thanks for the vote. Since you took the time to write such a good reply. I'll give you an upvote.
Sorry, I didn't want to be sarcastic. I agree perfectly with what you said. :)