ACHIEVEMENT 6 : Curation and Community

Objectives of this Achievement is:
-Newcomers know how curation work in steem
-Newcomers get to know what witness is and how to vote for witness
-Newcomers know how to create their own community or join the existing community that fit their interest
-Newcomers know how to use third party applications widely use by steemian such as discord.

Voting and Curation

There is a fixed reward pool on Steem.
Users vote on good content (like on Facebook) to distribute rewards from the reward pool to users who post quality content.
Users who distributed the rewards get 50 percent of the rewards they distributed.
The more Steem Power you have, the more rewards you can distribute from the reward pool.
Starting with the network's 16th hard fork in December 2016, Steem began creating new tokens at a yearly inflation rate of 9.5%. The inflation rate decreases at a rate of 0.01% every 250,000 blocks, or
about 0.5% per year.
The inflation will continue decreasing at this pace until the overall inflation rate reaches 0.95%. This will take about 20.5 years from the time hard fork 16 went into effect. After the Hardfork 21 this is the current distribution of the reward pool:

65% of the new tokens that are generated go to fund the reward pool, which is split between authors and curators.
15% of the new tokens are awarded to holders of SP.
10% pays for the witnesses to power the blockchain.
10% for the SPS/Steem DAO.

Source: Victor Frankenstein @symbionts steem witness

The informations on this section is from the FAQ section on Steemit webpage here

Voting and Curating

What is my voting mana?
Voting mana is like an "energy bar" in a computer game that goes down a little bit every time you vote. You start out with 100% voting mana. Every time you vote, you will use a small amount of your voting mana.

As you use more of your voting mana, your votes will carry less influence. A vote with 50% voting mana left will be worth 1/2 as much as a vote cast with 100% voting mana. Not to worry, the network recharges your voting mana by 20% every day.

How many times can I vote without depleting my voting mana?
Every 100% vote you cast will use 2% of your remaining voting mana. Your voting mana will recharge by 20% each day. You can vote more than 10 times per day, but each vote will be worth less, and it will take longer to reach full voting mana again.

Each user also has a mana pool specifically for down votes. This pool is 25% of the upvote mana pool. Downvotes will consume this mana first before consuming regular mana. When voting, 1/50th of the remaining mana is used for a 100% vote. The same math is used for downvote mana but multiplied by 4 because the downvote mana pool is 25% the size of the normal mana pool. The maximum of these values is used. When both mana pools are at 100%, the values are the same. When downvote mana runs out normal mana is used in the same manner as the current behavior.

Can I vote with less than 100% of my voting strength?
New users can only upvote and downvote with 100% voting strength.

Once you reach about 500 Steem Power, you will see a vote slider appear when you vote. You can use the slider to adjust the weight of your vote, between 1% and 100% voting strength. Voting with less than 100% voting weight will use up less voting mana, but it will also have less of an influence on the post or comment's rewards.

Where can I check my voting mana?
You can view your current voting mana using third party tools such as https://steemscan.com/account/youraccount or https://steemdb.io/@youraccount

What determines how much of the curation reward goes to the author versus curators?
The rewards are allocated so that 50% of the payout goes to the author of the post/comment, and 50% goes to the curator.

Of the 50% that goes to the curator, the curator will receive less than 100% if the curator votes within the first 5 minutes.
The split of the 50% that the curator receives during the first 5 minutes is calculated linearly based on the time the vote is cast.

If a post is upvoted the moment of posting, 100% of the curation reward will remain in the rewards pool.
At 1 minute, the curator receives 20%, and 80% remains in the rewards pool.
At 2 minutes, the curator receives 40%, and 60% remains in the rewards pool.
At 3 minutes, the curator receives 60%, and 40% remains in the rewards pool.
At 4 minutes, the curator receives 80%, and 20% remains in the rewards pool.
If a post is upvoted 5 minutes (or later) after posting, 100% of the curation reward goes to the curator.

Can I get curation rewards for upvoting comments?
Yes. You can earn curation rewards from upvoting both posts and comments!

Do I get curation rewards for downvoting posts or comments?
No. Since downvoting reduces the rewards on a post/comment, it does not earn curation rewards.

What are curation trails?
Some users decide to use third party applications such as steemauto to automatically cast votes. Users can automatically vote for the same posts and comments that other users does. Typically they will set this up to follow the votes of users who are good at curating. When a user has other users automatically voting for the same content that they do, the people that automatically vote after them are called their "curation trail".

Why don't my upvotes have an effect on a post's rewards?
A user with more SP is going to have a larger influence on the rewards than users with less SP. One vote from a user with a lot of SP can often have more of an effect than 100 votes from users with a small amount of SP.

Even though your vote may not have an immediate effect, when it gets added in along with all the other votes at the end of the payout period, it can still affect the payout. It may also cause more users to vote on the post too, because they saw that you upvoted it - so your votes can have an indirect effect on the payout this way.

Is there a way to make my votes count for more?
Yes. The more Steem Power you have, the more influence your votes will have.

The platform does not require that anybody purchase SP in order to participate, and there are many users who have earned a lot of Steem Power without spending any of their own money. You have the option of purchasing more Steem Power through your Steemit wallet or through any exhanges that offers STEEM pairs such as Poloniex.

What are the valid reasons for downvoting?
Users are allowed to downvote for any reason that they want. There are many users in the community who recommend only using the downvote on posts that are abusive. It is up to you if you want to follow this etiquette.

Does a downvote mean that I did something wrong?
Just because you received a downvote does not mean that you did something wrong. The downvoting person may have just been voting to reallocate the rewards in a way that they felt was more beneficial to the other active posts in the platform. Often users will leave a comment explaining why they downvoted, but sometimes they might not. If they left a reason, it is up to you to determine if you did anything wrong, and if there is anything you want to change.

Will a downvote hurt my reputation?
Not necessarily.
See: What causes my reputation score to go down?
What causes my reputation score to go down?
The only way for your reputation score to go down is to be downvoted by another user. Not all downvotes will cause a reputation loss though.

• Downvotes from users with a lower reputation score than you will not hurt your score.
• If your post or comment that was downvoted still received more upvotes than downvotes (weighted by SP), then the net effect on your reputation score will still be positive.

Witnesses

The Steem blockchain schedules witnesses to produce a new block every 3 seconds. 21 witness nodes produce 21 blocks in each 63-second round.
Steem Current Witnesses

What exactly is STEEM Witness suppose to do ?

What are Steem witnesses?
The Steem blockchain requires a set of people to create blocks and uses a consensus mechanism called delegated proof of stake, or DPOS. The community elects 'witnesses' to act as the network's block producers and governance body. There are 20 full-time witnesses, producing a block every 63-second round. A 21st position is shared by the backup witnesses, who are scheduled proportionally to the amount of stake-weighted community approval they have. Witnesses are compensated with Steem Power for each block they create.

For further explanation on what's a Steem Witness is and how to vote for witness you can read an article here by @shortsegments STEEM blockchain witnesses

You can vote up to 30 witnesses and since Steem Blockchain is based on DPOS(Delegate Proof of Stake)the more Steem Power you have the more weight on your vote to push the witness up in the rank of top 21 witnesses.

Delegations

As part of of your task, I encourage you to read this article to have an understanding about the delegation mechanism in steem.

Delegation in Steem Blockchain

Community

Currently there are some active community that you can join and see if their community description and interest are aligned with yours.
You can check the communities here

These are the list of community that are active on Steemit

• Mobile APPS WhereIN
• Banking and finance : Banking and Finance
• Photography and Arts: World of Xpilar
• Musics for Steem Contest Music for Steem
• Challenges and Promotion of STEEM: Steeming Curators
• Science, math, engineering: popularSTEM
• General topics: GEMS
• Arts : ART
• Economy, Cypto, Marketing: Project HOPE
• Korean: Korea•한국•KR•KO
  
• Chinese :STEEM CN/中文
  
• Latino: Symbionts
• Steem Africa : Steem Africa
• Steem Bangladesh : Steem Bangladesh
• Steem India : Steeming India
• Gaming Community: INVEN Gaming

please let me know other communities that active in the comment section so I can add them into the list.

Please make sure to read the community descriptions or rules of the community to avoid being muted or banned from the community.

There is a guide/tutorial on How to Create a Community here How to Create a Community on Steemit
Please let me know if you want to create your own community, I will pay the 3STEEM fees for you,under a condition that you already find more than 10 potential persons who will be joining your community.

Discord application

Some community use an application like discord as an off chain medium to communicate with each other faster because currently we don't have the messenger features as in Facebook yet.
You can refer to this tutorial on how to navigate discord
How to use Discord Part 1
How to use Discord Part 2

As a part of your task in this achievement lets see if you can say hi to me at Steem Community Center discord server here is the link Steem Community Center discord link

Notification Bot on Steem

You can have notification on everything that happening on your steemit account such as who upvoted/reply/commenting and etc on your post, to your direct message box on Discord too. I suggest you to use this Notification Bot for Steem made by ericet here Dino Bot

---

This is your final task on Newcomers Achievement Program, you can learn more about Steem Ecosystem here Steem.Centre
There is a community created by shortsegments explaining on how Steemit works in easy to understand explanation here Steemit Explained

---

The Task for Achievement 6

Please make a post based on the questions below:
Do you understand how voting and curation work in steemit?
What happened if you vote a post before 5 minutes marks after posting?
Who will you vote for Steem Witness ? and Why?
Which community will you join in Steemit, and why?

Please put the name of the country where you currently residing as one of your tag and this achievement tag #achievement6

Your post title should be:
Achievement 6 Task by @yoursteemitaccountname : Understanding Curation and Community

Note: After our curator of this achievement curated and checked this post, please compile all of your achievement task posts links into one post so we could do the final review.

---

---

• updated on 9/March/2022