What's "Voting Power" and Why You Shouldn't Vote TOO MUCH...
What's voting power?
Many users here especially those who are new think that upvoting as many posts as they can is a good idea. Some of them do it out of a bad habit while others do it for a vote back. Kind of like the follow me and I'll follow you back concept. This is not a wise thing to do at all. You see, at steemit, users have a voting power which decreases every time they vote for a post and will eventually increase again if they don't vote for a while. The ideal case is if you cast 20-40 votes per day and cast those votes throughout the day rather than all at the same time.
Why should you care?
There are many reasons why you should care about your voting power. You see, every vote you cast has a weight and plays a role in helping the content you vote for to go viral on the site. If your voting power is low, then your vote is hardly gonna count. It's kind of like gaining hundreds of followers who don't even come online or even when they do, they don't care to check and see if you have anything new. Followers that are not genuinely interested or dead followers are like votes that are not genuine and are therefore dead.
How do I check my voting power?
Currently there is no way to check your voting power on steemit.com. You can however check your voting power either on steemd.com or steemdb.com. The photo that I have created for this post is a collection of voting powers from different users that I shot off of my screen from steemdb.com. To see a similar bar for your account, go to steemdb.com/@username where username is your steemit username. Once the page loads, you can see your voting power on the right side of the screen as shown in my screenshot below.
Please share this with other Steemians
If you think this is helpful, please consider upvoting and sharing it with the other Steemians, especially the newbies. Also, please consider checking my other posts out!
Hi!!!nice to meet you!!thank you for your sharing.This post is very inportant,i still around 42% maybe be a lot of time to 100% voting power.i hope you can keep going to do it.i hope you have a nice friday.
No worries. I'm glad you found it helpful. :]
I find that successful steemers keep their voting power at 100%. Does that mean that they do not upvote at all? My voting power is pretty depleted, I'm so generous with those upvotes. I wonder if i'm hurting myself in my zeal!
You should maintain your voting power above 80%. Upvoting too much is not gonna help anyone because the more you vote, the less your votes will count! :]
I did it again! I upvoted my own comment and now my voting power is down 0.42% Ooops.
If your voting power is low, then your vote is hardly gonna count." – Can someone explain or provide a link to an explanation of the mathematical code that calculates how relevant a vote is relative to the remaining voting power an account has?
Each vote generates a revenue for the post depending on how much Steem Power the voter has. But Steem Power is not the only factor here. Your voting power determines how much of your Steem Power can be used. You can have an account that has millions of Steem in it but if your voting power is reduced to 0, then your votes won't produce any revenue for the post which is the main factor in causing the post to go viral on the site. I don't have any links to the mathematical calculations behind it, to be honest.
Thanks msg768.
Thank you @msg768! Every day I'm learning something new here :)
I checked my stats at steemd and it says on the bottom right "account snap shot taken 17 hours ago". It's true because the number of followers doesn't match my current one. Does that mean it shows the voting power of 17 hours ago, too? It currently shows just under 90%, which is strange because I haven't made 40 upvotes yet this morning (it goes down only after 40 votes, right?)
No worries. No the voting power is up-to-date as far I'm concerned. It goes down by each vote not after 40. Each vote consumes about half a percent I think so 40 votes would take you down to almost 80% but this is all just an estimate because the actual math behind it is quite complicated! :)
OH OK thank you. I thought it would say at 100% and only start going down after the first 40 votes. Thank you!
Yes, some things are a bit complicated here :) On one hand I admire the attention to detail and all possible outcomes that seem to have been included in the math, on the other it makes it impossible to understand and remember for a common human, I think :D
I didn't know much about voting power before reading this article. I found to be very useful and included it in a guide for newbies that I just put together.
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@doule/a-steemit-faq-especially-for-newbies-the-most-helpful-pages-start-here-and-get-up-to-speed-fast
Cheers mate! Glad you found it helpful. I saw your article and upvoted it! :]
It was. I didn't even know where to find voting power, and the images are great too. Thank you for the upvote as well!
No worries :)
Great information for newbies.
I'm a little surprised there isn't a way to check daily power within the UI.
Future Upgrade maybe?
Thanks for explaining this, it makes things easier to learn.
I see now, thanks! o.o
Don't worry. I was exactly like yourself when I first joined! LOL
Naive noob votegivers huh xD
Pretty much but voting power is not the only factor. The other factor is Steem Power which you can't really do much about other than buying/earning Steem and powering up! :]
Yea I have 10,500 or so, for now. Enlighten me, how ridiculously low is that? xD
You actually have 10.502! SO it's actually 10 not 10,000! You also have (+27.536) which is delegated to you from someone else, probably from Steemit because you're a newbie. You don't own the + in brackets. It's for someone else and I don't know how to figure out who it is from yet but they can remove it at any time they want. As for how ridiculously low is that, I think you need like 200 SP for your vote to be worth about $0.01 and 200 Steem is now about $400 USD. So your vote is currently worth less than $0.01 which is why when you upvoted my comment, the value remained at $0.00! :]
Oh I see... Thank you so much for taking the time to explain to me! :3
No problem :]
Very helpful! Thank you!
Your welcome! :]