Steemit. The Common Mistakes!

Steemit is a platform that can be pretty daunting for new users, but also for experienced veterans. With every Hard Fork you have to find your balance again. I’ve seen a pretty high amount of users making mistakes based on incorrect information. To help people understand this amazing platform I’ve made a list of the most common mistakes that are made, that I’ve noticed while curating posts.

What is steemit.com?

Steemit is running on a the new blockchain technology and what we call a front-end, client or GUI. Steemit is communicating with an authoritative application, which is basically a server. This is something you won’t notice right away, but what you can notice is that Steemit is a social media platform where you can post your knowledge and share it with the rest on the world.

Upvoting rewards

A mistake that I see more often is that people are assuming that their vote is responsible in the change of rewards. However this is only half true, because yes you are using your voting power and give some of the rewards you can give, but it also doesn’t update in real-time. When you refresh your page your rewards can be lowered again. How come? Let me explain!

The STEEM price on the internal market. The price changes every minute so the rewards will change with it accordingly.
All incoming/outgoing or flags that happen on your post. Votes and flags on all the other content.

Unvoting?

Yes, you can unvote your vote. People are doing it pretty often. But why? It doesn’t get you anything! In the current state of steemit you will not get your voting power back. When you vote, you put in voting power and you will never get that back. Of course it replenishes some new though ;). So when you vote, be sure you want to vote on it!

The hard earned rewards

So you might have noticed that there is a $ sign under each post that gives a certain amount of rewards. If might be a couple of pennies or thousands of dollars. This isn’t the full price the author gets. The total amount is divided between the author and the curators.
(I’ve explained some here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@rkrijgsman/curating-rewards-explained)
The author gets 50%+ of the total amount and is most likely in the neighbourhood of 80%.

Rewards can be paid out in either 50% Steem backed dollars (SBD) and 50% Steem power or in 100% Steem power. The choice is up to the author when he writes the article. In some cases you will get rewards of Steem on top of the SBD.

You made a mistake and want to edit?

Well bad news guys, your data (you blogposts) are saved on the blockchain so it’s permanent. Every edit you make will stay forever on the blockchain. I can’t state this more obvious, once published, your information can never be removed again! So think before you post something!

That content is cool (& old)

I got people voting on my content, amazing! Even though the content is older than 7 days they still vote for it. Now I personally really like this because it gives acknowledgement that they really like it. But financially speaking, you won’t get any rewards from it anymore. Content that is older than 6 days and 12 hours won’t receive any more rewards from upvotes. When you vote on content that is older than 7 days, it will not cost any voting power, but it also won’t assign any rewards. Of course it’s still fun to acknowledge people and their hard work!

It’s so popular, I wanna vote!

A ton of people vote on popular content that has already $100+. When you are curating posts of that size, your curation reward will be way smaller. I have gone in depth on this subject in my post I previously linked to.

Reputation

Reputation in the normal way states that the person is pretty big and knows what he is doing. The guy is popular and everything he says must be true. On Steemit this isn’t always the case. Reputation is related to how much rewards the user has received. So people can vote on themselfs and vote on their own content or may use Randowhale with their own money to increase this number. So this doesn’t always represent that the user posts quality stuff. So when reading a post of someone with a high reputation, also check the comments if people are agreeing and let other valid the post as well!

It takes several days to convert SBD to Steem

This is only true when you use the internal conversion from Steemit. When you use that system it takes longer to make sure you get the average rate of that period. This is only useful for Steemit users that don’t trade on the markets and don’t need the money as quickly.

If you do want your money quick or want to trade your hard earned SBD, you can trade it on the internal market or on external exchanges like Bittrex and/or Poloniex.

Start saving gives you interest!

No. This is actually not true in the real meaning of the word. It’s to prevent other people from accessing your hard earned money in case you get hacked or a ‘friend’ get to knows your password and sends it to himself. That’s why it takes 3 days, so you have time to act.

I hope you liked this article and found it interesting! If so, please leave a comment and resteem it to share it with your network!