If you have any questions you want answered in the next part of the series, post them in the comments and I'll do my best to hunt down a good answer!

If you see any mistakes in my answers or incorrect information, please don't hesistate to tell me!  I'll fix it so long as I can still Edit the post (before the first payout).

Let's get started!  Please remember this is a FAQ, I don't want to flood the page with pictures as it's supposed to be mostly easy to find information.

What is Steemit?

One of the best answers to this question is one I found from @tuck-fheman from a portion of this post:

 Steem is an aggregate social networking site where users, or "Steemians", post original content, links from the Internet and questions. Steem users upvote or downvote this content to promote interesting post and reward the author. As a post's popularity increases, it gains more visibility and the author is likely to receive even more rewards for their effort.

Steemit is a lot like Reddit, in that respect.  The difference between the two comes from the rewards and a blockchain being tied to Steemit, providing an incentive for people to post genuine content.

How do I upvote a post I see?

This one's an easy one.  Next to a post you're looking at in the main thread, or at the bottom of every post's actual page, you'll see something like this:

The button I've marked in red is the button you click to Upvote a post.  One click and you're done.  You can also click it again to undo your upvote but this will reset your curation rewards so be careful!

What is curating and how does it work?  Am I going to be running a museum?

Not quite, but sometimes it does feel as though you're sorting through hundreds of collectibles, trying to find the ones that interest you or would look good in your hypothetical museum.

Curating content is basically the process of upvoting and commenting on someone else's work.  In turn, Steemit rewards the people who curated a post with 25% of the post's earnings.  In other words, if you see a post on the Trending page of Steemit, and let's say it's at $400, $100 of that goes to people who curated that post, based on when their curation was performed.

There's a lot more to this question that I'll probably answer further in the Steemit FAQ series, once we've gotten some beginner questions down.

Why is there a timer counting down on the post I just created?

It's nothing scary, if that's what you're afraid of.  It's not a countdown until your post gets deleted or anything silly like that.  That countdown marks when the First Payout from your post will happen.  It used to be 12 hours initially, but they've since upped it to 24 hours when you author new work.

This little timer goes down as time passes by, and when it hits 0, you are instantly paid out for work.  Keep in mind however, that this timer can also go up!  If your post becomes quite popular, and you're absolutely drowning in upvotes, it will actually add time to the timer so you can keep accruing upvotes and comments!  This bit is genius, in my opinion, because it lets the really interesting posts on Steemit garnish some more time, so more people see it, rather than every article dying after 24 hours.

Once this timer has finished, it changes a bit.  If you click on the dollar amount, it drops down a little tab like this:

This indicates the First Payout has been completed, and where the rewards went.  It also tells you when the Second Payout will be (always 4 weeks later) and for how much, if anyone has been upvoting your posts after the First Payout was already sent.

How do I get paid for my personal posts?  Why is it less than the amount initially showed?

This questions is probably one of THE most-asked questions on Steemit, so I had to put some information in this post regarding it.  Let's pretend for a moment that when you joined Steemit you had an incredible stroke of luck and genius, and you wrote a lovely little post about penguin mating patterns, and it earned you a shiny $800.

From your $800, a few things happen.  25% of this total amount ($200) goes to the people who curated your post, doing the upvoting and commenting that made it successful.  The other 75% ($600) goes to you, but in two separate ways.

50% of the remaining $600 ($300) goes into your Steem Power, which is basically your "investment" in Steemit that accrues interest over time (more on this later).  The other $300 goes into your Steem Dollars wallet, which is available for use immediately.

So if your post generated $800 total, and you only see $300 Steem Dollars in your account, that's why!  You have to remember some transferred to your Steem Power and the curators!

An easy way to figure out how much actual Steem Dollars you will generate from your post is to multiply the total amount (the amount shown next to the Upvote option) by 0.375.

This will tell you about how much Steem Dollars you'll get, and the equivalent amount in Steem Power after curation rewards are subtracted.

Thanks for reading!  If you have questions you want answered for next parts of the series, comment them below!  For more interesting content, be sure to Follow me @voltarius!