and why it is important for minnows to upvote good new posts

I catch myself wondering why I still "like" stuff on Facebook and Youtube, because it feels so insignificant und useless after beeing on Steemit for only two weeks. Basically:

Liking on Facebook & Co.

Upvoting on Steemit

Anyone else knows that feel?

Why this is important for minnows

Digging through new posts on the search for the jewels and trying to help them get views is a rewarding work, and when you have less than a thousand Steem Power we need you to help us out. I'll explain why:

Value divison

The total amount of STEEM being handed out over all posts is fixed and distributed, weighted by STEEM POWER times Voting power[%] (check steemd.com/@[username]). People with more skin in the game show a higher interest in the prosperity of the platform and are rewarded with a higher weighted vote.

But wait there's more: The amount of combined weighted votes on a post is also counted nonlinear (spez: quadratic). A post with 100 weighted votes (VESTS and Steem power of all votes) has thus 10,000 times the reward then a post with 1% of its weighted votes.

This should explain why collective upvoting of popular posts actually extremly drains the money available for smaller posts.

Lets continue with the important part.

Why do early voters get more money?

Vote timing is dicribed in many articles as "who votes first gets a bigger part of the pie", but ony when I stumbled about @dantheman 's post I found a mathematical explanation. Read his article for a more detailed description. I just want to summerize it here:

Weights in % = SP of voter * (SP of voter /(SP of voter + all before it)) ^ 2

First post gets 100 Weights because: Weights = 1 * (1 / 1)^2 * 100 = 100

Notice that this equation is 100 Weights vor every number of SP for the first voter.

The second vote with the same SP gets only 25 Weights because: 

Weights = 1 * (1 / 2)^2 * 100 = 1 * 0.25 * 100 = 25

This is the piece of cake this principle is about!

Do the calculation and you will see that the third vote with the same SP will only get 9 weights. In the end with an article with three equally strong votes will give the thrid vote onla: 

Reward = 9 / (100 + 25 + 9) = 6.7 %

A second vote, that wants to get 100 weights like the first vote needs to have a little over double the SP. The third vote would then need 3.5 times the SP and would still only get 33% of the curation.

This leads to three conclusions:

1. The earlier you vote before a whale, the further is his SP diluted. 

HIGHEST LEVERAGE FOR YOUR SP!

2. If you vote on an already high article, your low SP will get further deluted. 

YOU GET NOTHING!

3. If a whale votes very early, there are only breadcrumps left to get. 

YOU GET ALMOST NOTHING!

Timing

To prevent aggressive quickvoting, the creator recieves a percentage of the curation in the first 30 minutes additional to the 50 % for the post he gets anyway. You get almost 0% curations @ 0 minutes and the percentage goes linear to 100% of curations at 30 minutes after posting.

Good Hunting!

P.S.: Also look at @piedpipers post here: Quick Answer: Why certain posts earn so much more than others to find out why whales earn so much and you so few, and look at this article here from @dantheman for more info about curation award.