For Fresh Newcomers: A Basic Guide to Steem Stats, Voting Power, and Steem Power
steemit·@briggsy·
0.000 HBDFor Fresh Newcomers: A Basic Guide to Steem Stats, Voting Power, and Steem Power
 -- -- https://steemstats.com https://steemnow.com -- -- New users are easy to spot. I am still one. We start out by upvote spamming and upvote begging. Posting streams of garbage in an attempt to boost exposure. I think I've grown out of that beginner phase after using Steemit for a week, and that's partly because I started looking into how Steem actually works. Luckily, that information is out there, but scattered. It takes some effort. To be honest, I'm not even sure if everything I've learned is still 100% relevant. Of course, this is not the first post someone has made about Steem Stats, or Voting Power and Steem Power. But, over time the old posts sink into the quicksand of obscurity, and a new post needs to be done. This post isn't going to be extremely in depth. I'm not an expert on Steemit and how the whole thing exactly works. Hopefully this helps in being more relatable for fresh newcomers. Now everyone sing Kumbaya  -- -- So, I'm assuming you've already opened up either the Steemstats or Steemnow website by now from the link above, or you already know about them and are curious if I am going to add some new insights. Unfortunately I'm probably not going to. What I do know, is that steemstats or Steamnow give you a great overview of your account, and also shows your current voting power on Steemit, and anyone else you want to spy on. But how does voting power work? Basically, if you haven't voted for a while, your voting power will be at 100%. Every time you vote with 100% weight (more on that in a sec), your voting power goes down by 2%. So, at 100% voting power, you'd go down to 98%. If you were at 50% voting power, you would go down to 49%. Every 24 hour period, your voting power recovers by 20% flat rate. If you are at 50% voting power, in 24 hours you'll be at 70% voting power if you don't vote in that 24 hour time period. This voting power works in conjunction with how much Steem power you have, and the weight behind your upvote. Once you obtain 500 Steem power, you can choose what weight you want to place towards your upvote, multiplied by your voting power. So if you had 50% voting power remaining according to the Steemstats page, and chose to give 50% weight on the slider (see it below) you would effectively give a 25% vote, although the receiver would see it as 50% weighted upvote (are you confused yet?). Also of note, if you vote 50% on the weight slider, you're voting power would only drop by 1%, not the 2% that you'd lose with a 100% slider vote. Here is a voting calculator created by @penguinpablo https://www.steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html For reference, the upvote weight slider I'm referring to looks like this:  -- -- Don't worry about the upvote slider for now, it doesn't matter until you have piles of Steem Power. Once you do have lots of Steem Power, you don't want to be voting a dollar to a post that might only deserve 10 cents, or if you want to save your voting power but still upvote someone a little. Until you reach 500 Steam Power (and keep it at or above 500), you are always going to give a 100% weighted upvote, multiplied by your Voting power. If you have less than (I believe) 5 Steem Power, you upvotes are not worth anything anyway, and you should either focus on creating good posts with good formatting that will get upvoted to earn you Steem Power, or go to an exchange and trade for Steem, transfer it here to your wallet and convert it to Steem Power. Powering down Steem Power back into Steem will currently take 13 weeks in equal sums to complete, so it's not as liquid as Steem itself, but as more Steem is pumped out into the system, a percentage of it goes towards everyone's steem power, negating some of the inflation that occurs with the Steem dilution. -- -- This should not be confused with Steam Dollars and Dividends, of which is at 0% for the time being and subject to change. Aside from the small uptick over time as the system adds to your Steem Power, you can really accumulate steem power if you participate on Steemit, write good posts (quality over quantity), and interact with comments - but again quality over quantity. I would recommend doing 50/50 split for posts between Steem Power and Steem Dollars, just because Steem dollars are worth a nice sum on the markets, and because they aren't locked for at least 13 weeks like Steem Power. Also remember that It's glaringly obvious when you receive comments from a newcomer. There's no need to comment on everything, hoping for an upvote by the author or other readers. If you're spamming, Anyone can check your comment history and see you're spamming. If you really annoy someone with a lot of Steem Power, they can even hurt your Steem reputation score by a lot. Just look at @berniesanders score to see. But I'm afraid that's all I've learned so far. Hopefully it helps some newcomers acclimatize to the Steemit platform. If anyone reading this sees any errors, please don't hesitate to correct me and I'll update the post, post-haste -- -- Anywho. As always, good luck, good wealth and good health to all my fellow Steemians. Thank you for reading and sharing.