Whats in a REP? @curie raises some unexplored questions.
Exciting news!!!
I was curied!
I know not as exciting as you getting curied but I do like sharing!
What's interesting about this, besides that it was on a gardening post, my least favourite thing to do and talk about, was the impact it had on my reputation (REP) score. Of course, I was excited about the 300 plus votes and 35$ but I had been slaving away at 51 for weeks and just this weekend reached 52, expecting that it would take many more weeks of hard work and quality efforts to reach 53, if not longer as I have heard that each REP level is ten times harder to get than the prior one.
So, imagine my surprise when I checked my VP on SteemNow* and saw that my REP had jumped close to 53 bypassing most of 52 with one upvote, at this stage only thinking of @curie as the upvoter.
*Change the username in the URL to yours to find out some interesting details, including your current voting power.
However, upon further reflection, it's not one upvote, as I already said above I got hundreds. With the price of Steem these days for many that does equate to a sub 0.00 upvote but its an upvote all the same. So what made the most difference to my REP? The hundreds of upvotes or the one large upvote, who as you can see below is from someone linked with @curie, not Curie themselves.
@curie at 26%, top vote @hedrikdegrote 28.14$
Let the research begin!
Curie
First, It looks like the Curie reviewer decides the % the post is worth and the backers follow suit at the same % determining the overall value of your post. After some investigation I found this was an option under the curation trail section on Steemauto, @curie has close to 800 followers, they can either vote with a "fixed" or a "scaled" percentage. Fixed as in you set it and scaled as in the original upvoter, in this case, Curie decides on the vote and all others follow suit.
So why didn't I get the full 791 upvotes assigned to the curation trail? Because Steemauto is smart and has a "Limit on voting power" section in setting that allows you to set the minimum VP you wish to cut off your auto voting at! Now, that's a win for the good guys or is it the smart guys! If you don't know about voting power (VP) please do check out the post at the bottom of this as its super important if you want to succeed on Steemit.
None of this while interesting answers my original question of why my REP jumped, so let move along with what makes a REP.
What's so important about the REP number?
In theory, it is supposed to be an indicator of how trusted you are on steemit and a source of protection against low REP authors taking vengeance on your REP. How well does this work? I am not too sure as I it looks like the bid-bots throw in a dynamic that was not originally planned for, only time will tell.
Key things about REP
After some more research I found the same things written time and time again:
- We all start at 25, this is a super simplified breakdown of your actual reputation number found on steemd. There is a very complicated formula that I am not even going to show you as understanding the calcualtion will not help understand your REP.
- It only increases with upvotes (on posts and comments, comments are just as important),
- and it only decreases with downvotes or flags.
- The illusion I had at the beginning between account value and rep is highly unfounded,
- as is the link between REP and such terms as “Whale” as you don’t need to have a high rep to be a whale nor does a high REP mean that you are a “Whale”.
I mean look @berniesanders, he is a huge and well known, his rep is -17, something I thought impossible to do but a flag war will do that to you, lucky it has no effect on his overall account value which still sits at over $6K
I know why they shortern it now!
Two things to note
So your REP can only be affected by up & downvotes, what happens if you are unfairly downvoted? First sadly life isn’t fair and sometimes we get flagged for things outside our understanding and while it can hurt our post payouts, there are a few safeguards for your REP.
- Anyone with a negative REP cannot affect your REP, either up or down.
- Downvotes will only affect your REP if the downvoter has a higher REP than yours.
Reward Shares
This is where it gets tricky and sadly I have been told you must understand it, to understand how the REP is calculated.
Every day there is a renewal of the reward pool, when you vote you use your portion of the reward pool dependant on your SteemPower to reward the author 75% and the remaining 25% to the people who voted for the post/comment, yes this includes you.
The 75% is simple, it goes to the author and is not split any further, the curation percentage, on the other hand, is much more like Steemit and a complicated beast. There are a few factors that affect the reward share you receive from your upvote.
- Time of the vote, the best time is said to be at 30 minutes but this is affected by prior voters.
- Reputation,
- Steem Power,
- and current Voting Power (VP) held by the curator.
All these factors combined give the curator or upvoter a Reward Share.
Found on @ilyastarar's POST. I believe this information used to be available on steemdb but I was unable to replicate from the votes tab, if anyone can show me the *reward shares from my most recent post WARNING: The Ficus Tree and The Booty! I would appreciate it.
Reward Share to REP
I am so confused, how did we go from REP to Rewards Shares and now back to REP. Just hang on for a little longer, I promise it will come clear, well as clear as I can get it in my head…
The effect each voter has on your REP is a complex calculation using the REP of the voter and the reward share the voter has received as part of voting for your post. This is then added to that giant REP number I showed you on steemd. Which is then simplified back down for Steemit into our simple two-digit REPs.
While this hasn’t answered my initial question of which is better the one large upvote or the 300 plus other votes, the missing reward share information may have helped with that. I have, however, come to the conclusion that both aided in raising my REP fast, which raises a whole heap of other questions around the use of bid-bot’s and the ability to raise your REP even with spam if you had enough money to lose.
Yes, I said loose, but that is for another day. I hope this has helped you understand more about how your REP works and how it is affected by those around you. Thank you @curie for thinking my post was worth an upvote, I truly appreciate it and love the boost you give to undervalued consistent Steemians.
*Please note that I am still new, only three months in and this is my interpretation of how a REP works using many articles to decipher, I may be special but it took me that many to come to my conclusions, even within these articles I found conflicting information, so if any part of this is incorrectly stated, please let me know in the comments and I will fix.
Power Up and Steem ON!
Want some inspiration or a maybe a laugh, I'm pretty funny I have been told. CHECK out these posts, all brought to you by @insideoutlet!
WARNING: The Ficus Tree and The Booty!
Good Friday, The Good, The Bad & The Ficus!.
Foosball fun for a Good Friday eve!
My hubby is also a great steemian worth a follow, check him out @shai-hulud. Below are some of his:
Steemit Week 1: Who Are You
Don't get hooked by a Phishing scam. Actual steps you can take to protect yourself.
Steemit Day One #2: Why lock an Empty House
Welcome to Steemit. Day one: Get ready for the learning curve.
Don't forget to follow us so you don't miss a thing!
What to know more about @shai-hulud and I Check out these posts: If you like it please consider upvoting a more recent post as this one has now paid out.
Butt naked with 2500 other cruise line passengers! Featured in @qurator & @asapers
Love isn’t always shit free. Featured in @thesteemengine and #themagnificentseven from @catweasel & @enchantedspirit
How I got flipped Inside Out... For REAL! Featured in @thesteemengine
Did YOU know that your upvote needs time to recharge? If not check out this post below, if you like it please consider upvoting a more recent post as this one has now paid out.
Steem & Voting Power, how not to waste it!
One last thing! @asapers a new curation team has started a profit-sharing curation post promotion, follow @asapers to check it and more out!
Images are were taken from steemit blockchain related webpages.
Congratulations on getting a big upvote. Your post has made a few things clearer to me on how Steemit works, but I still have more reading round to do.
I think we will forever have more reading and learning to do, Steem blockchain is a complicated beast and takes dedication to learn. I just keep plodding along hoping I get it right lol.
Very informative @insideoutlet. I was still trying to understand this 'reputation' thing.
It sure does seem to give you visibility, just as in normal life, i reckon. High reputation means you are easily noticed, and listened to.
But does it necessarily translate to high rewards? I am still not sure. I have read some really high reputation blogs, and still found them to be earning much less compared to even those with low REP.
I don't understand why/how.
That said. We all seem to have shared the curie blessing. Yes. I was also curied yesterday.
I kind of woke up and, found my reputation has meteor-ed from 40 to 46. And then i am like, how on earth, only to check out my blog and find hundreds of votes.
I am sure you can imagine the excitement. My reputation was up, and so was my first high, and yet record reward on my posts.
Congrat's on your curie too @mirrors, I knew after reading your posts to keep my eye on your for curie, so it didn't surprise me. You should be super proud, it's exciting to be recognised by any curator but a curie is a big monetary reward too which helps you power up and Steem on. See you around Discord and keep up the amazing work promoting the @asapers :)
See you there, and out! @insideoutlet. And thanks for the support. @asapers is doing a great job. I am proud to be part of it.
I’ll admit, I may be wrong on some points, but I think there are a couple areas where rep is actually a bit simpler than what you describe.
I believe Rep is entirely a handy scoring mechanism that is flawed by some of the things you mention (bid bots, self votes, flag wars.) It’s basically a running tally of the entire account history of upvotes vs. downvotes at a glance. That doesn’t mean that someone with negative Rep never earned any rewards, as flags on a post can continue to drive Rep down even after the payout value has been reduced to 0.00. So if someone earns $10 on post #1 and then gets $20 worth of flags on post #2, they will have gained money ($10) but lost Rep (twice as many downvotes as upvotes) over the course of the two posts. Rep of course in no way reflects account value due to this, as well as transfers in & out, etc. (as you note with Bernie’s Rep vs. value)
However I don’t believe Rep ever factors into reward calculations for curation, and I believe the idea that only people of higher Rep can hurt your Rep is a myth that has perpetuated. Bernie Sanders is a great example, at -17 Rep he is still adept at destroying the reps of a great many users. As with most things on the platform, Steem Power is the main factor, commingled with Voting Power %.
On several occasions I’ve heard of Rep being referred to as “non-consensus”, presumably alluding to the fact that it actually is not inherent or key to any blockchain calculations.
I also believe the increasing difficulty of Rep levels does not occur every level, it is every 10 levels. So getting from 50-51, 51-52, etc. is as hard as getting from 40-50. Getting from 60-61 is as difficult as all of the 50’s and so on. I know that for me personally, hitting 60 was like a brick wall and progress slowed to a crawl!
The white paper is huge for Steem as it should be and unfortunately not my forte to read these types of things, to make it worse there conflicting articles so it's hard to decipher the truth through the misconceptions.
This scares me a little, I like to think there is some protection from this type of bullying, not Bernie specifically but in general from disgruntled Steemians.
So you believe its just a calculation of the SP and Current VP? I can see how that would make sense. Thanks for stopping by, more research may be required but another day. :)
Thank you for dropping by :)
I wondered about the curie vote. I've gotten it a couple of times, but it seems to be very random as far as the actual upvote value each time. Thanks for the informative post. I feel like I've read about reputations several times and I still feel like I must be missing something! Just because of some people who seem to catapult to the top and others who are slaving away at it.
At any rate, congrats to you for the curie vote and for figuring this system out, even a little bit! I'm always pleased to see that my rep is growing slowly but steadily, so I must be doing something right :)
Great post!
It took me ages to understand it even this far. I had too keep re reading the same sections in various parts to pull out all together. You have a great rep. I once saw a post about how many people had reached each level. Was very cool.
Congrats on the @curie vote. That's always a great experience, and a sign you are going in the right direction. I'm not surprised you got one given the detail you put into your posts, like this one. And Rep is one of those things that seem understandable until you drill down into the details. But mostly I think I understand the process. Although watching the slowness of progress at these higher levels is painstaking. I think I got to 66 rep about the middle of last year. Finally made 67 a little while back. And who knows, maybe 68 by the end of the year, lol.
Thanks @naquoya, I need to do a little more research as @bryan-imhoff mentioned:
So I am no sure if it is just the decades that rise or each level gets more difficult. The white paper is huge for Steem as it should be but not my forte at reading and there are conflicting articles so its hard to decipher it all. Thank you for dropping by :)
Congratulations on being curied @insideoutlet.
Reputation is an interesting metric but like a lot of other things here, I find it less valuable now that I've seen many people artificially raise theirs as a side effect of using bid bots. 😢
Good explanation of how it all works though! 😊
Thank you, yes when I started I thought rep was the main factor but soon realised there were many factors to consider. Thanks for stopping by 😁
I do find the whole thing quite confusing! Complicated algorithms, etc.
I did just join the curie Discord channel, but I probably won't stay on that one - too much to take in and way too much work!!! But hey, it's interesting to find out about them.
Sounds like they don't often repeat a curie vote, so enjoy it!!!
Everything is confusing in the beginning, you are doing great, don't give up on Discord, it is a great way to get your posts promoted, you just have to choose the right channels. The give and take community ones are best. The @asapers of course lol, also @thesteemengine is great and @curie.
You are correct curies are rarely repeated and even rarer on a similar content post, lucky mine was gardening as I never write about that lol...
lol - good for you then!!!
Yep, I didn't stay on @curie - for now, anyway. Maybe at some point later, it will be a better match. I have picked up a couple of other channels, but I think I'm at capacity for the time being.
It can be too much. I only engage with about 4 servers and all of them are set to mute for my sanity or they beep all nihht lol.
I would really like to reduce/eliminate e-mail notifications... any idea how to do that?
There is an option to mute the server. On my phone i think i just hold down the icon and tick the box that has mute server. Or right click on the PC i think. Contact me on there if you need more guidance.
Isn't it great when you get curied it happened to me before on two of my posts taking my rep from 36 to 50 whoa.
I think you did a great explanation of how rep works and the importance of it, sometimes I value my rep more than my steem value.
Thank you, I really tried to simplify it more for myself than for others, I had to read and reread sections to get my head around it. I think there may still be some misconceptions in my work, and more research may be required but another day. Thanks for dropping by, I always like to hear from you. :)
Congratulations on the curie vote! Wow this is an extensive write on what you have discovered. Some of these technical things boggle me so thanks for using laymen terms so it is way easier to understand through your post @insideoutlet :)
Sometimes I think it's still confusing and then I just remember it's all maths and it seems to work so why to question it. lol.
Congrats on the Curie @insideoutlet!
I read through this post thinking ooh and ahh and I never realized that. Then I finished and realized I still don't understand how rep works here =-O Oh well. I won't let that stop me from creating the best content I can.
Cheers!
haha, I totally understand that. In short each person gets a number rewardshare for the value of curation they make off your post, that is added to your rep number or minus'ed if its a downvote.
Never stop making great content :)