Achievement 6: Understanding Curation and Community

To thrive in the steem blockchain, you must know how voting and curation work in Steemit, who to vote for Steem Witness, and which community to join. In this post, i will explain how voting and curation work, what happened when you vote a post before the 5 minutes marks after posting, who to vote for Steem Witness and why? And which community to join and why?

Voting and curation

There's what we called fixed reward pool on Steem, from where users distribute rewards by vote to other users who post quality content. And users get 50% of the rewards they distribute.

Your capacity to distribute huge rewards depends on your steem power. It means that, the more steem power you have, the more rewards you can distribute from the reward pool.

The reward pool is funded by Steem Inc. from tokens it creates, more than half of the tokens generated fund the reward pool.

The lasted distribution of the reward pool is as follows:
> 65% of the new tokens generated go to fund the reward pool, which is share among 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

How Voting and Curating work

There's what is called Voting Mana on Steemit;

Voting Mana is like an energy bar in a computer game that goes down a little bit every time you vote. ^Source

When you begin voting with 100% Voting Mana, anytime time you vote, you'll use a small amount of your Voting Mana. And as you use more of your Voting Mana, your votes will carry less influence. A vote with 50% Voting Mana for instance will be worth 1/2 as much as a vote cast with 100% Voting Mana by 20% per day.

Every 100% vote you cast will use 2% of your remaining Voting Manna. Your Mana recharges by 20% each day, enabling you vote more than 10 times per day, however, every single vote will be worthless and it then takes it longer time to reach full Voting Manna again.

Each user also has a Mana pool alocated specifically for down votes, which is 25% of the upvotes mana pool. Down vote will first use this mana before consuming the regular mana. And when voting, 1/50th of the remaining mana is used for a 100% vote, the exact math is applied to downvote mana but multiplied by 4 because the down vote mana pool is 25% the size of the normal mana pool; the maximum of these values are used. And when the mana pools are at 100%, the values are the same. Normal mana is then used in the same manner as the current behaviour, as downvote mana runs out.

What happened if you vote a post before 5 minutes marks after posting, and who to vote for Steem Witness and why?

The reward in Steemit is shared in such a way that 50% of the pay out goes to the author of the post/comment and 50% goes to the curator. By the rule, the reward can only be received from this 50/50 percent when the vote is done within the first 5 minutes. A situation where a post is upvoted before the 5 minutes marks, 100% of the curation reward will remains in the reward pool.

In making decision on who to vote for Steem Witness, i strongly advise you give your vote to a Steem Witness that has an awsome reputation in pulling out Steem Power. This is simply because they can canguarantee Steem Blockchain from which you earn rewards.

Community to Join in Steemit and Why?

There're a lot of active Communities on Steemit to join. However, before deciding tp join any community, look up for their community description and interest and see if they aligned with yours. Your goal for joining any community should be, to impact the community and be impacted by the community.

All the communities on the Steemit can be found here, while some of the active communities are as follows
> Banking and Finance: Banking and Finance
> Musics for Steem contest: Music for Steem
> Mobile Apps: WhereIN
> Photography and Arts: World of Xpilar
> General topics: GEMS
> Challenges and promotion of STEEM: Steeming Curators
> Science, Math, Engineering: popularSTEM
> Arts: ART
> Economy, Crypto, Marketing: Project HOPE
> Gaming Community: INVEN Gaming
> Steem India: Steeming India
> Steem Africa: Steem Africa
> Steem Bangladesh: Steem Bangladesh
> Latino:Symbionts