HF 19, the voting power and you! (explanation especially for newbies) (repost)

We have done it! Hardfork 19 (HF 19)! But what does that mean, especially for new users?

This is a repost of my article just half a day ago. Normally I would not have done this, but I got such an overwhelmingly positive response (including a record number of thank you comments) that I thought I should give the American readers a chance, who now should start to come home from school, university or work, to find it in their timeline.

What everyone could see at first glance is that most posts have increased their payout by several magnitudes. The reason is (I guess) that old votes are counted as if they would have been done under the new 4x voting power. These votes are still valid though and should keep their $ if I am right.

But what is that voting power everyone is speaking about?

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Your voting power can be described as your ability to give $ to posts you upvote.

For so-called "whales" with a lot of steem power - steem power or SP is the basis for your voting power - that means tens of dollar per upvote!
But if you are very new, you may not see an increase at all! Be busy, wrote good (or even better: great) articles, make good comments and upvote posts yourself, and you will get followers and upvoters, promise!

Voting power is not indefinite!

As you may have guessed you cannot go around just upvoting everything you see. Your voting power has a maximum.

Before HF 19 that maximum was equivalent to 40 upvotes per day. If you were a normal person and upvoting things you liked and that was all, you would likely never touch that upper limit, "wasting" a bit of your power to decide on the payments (other's votes just got a tiny bit more important).

After HF 19 the potential voting power you can use has increased by 4 times. That means your upper limit for voting is now 10 votes per day at full power.

Does that mean I cannot vote more then 10 times a day?

No, you can vote as often as you want. But your voting power will go down. You can see your current voting power for example at steemed. Just replace your user name with mine: https://steemd.com/@lennstar

Here is my voting power:

As you can see I have voted more then 10 times with full power in the last 24 hours, so my voting power is down to ~90%.

That means that my next vote will only give 90% of the maximum $ I could have given with full power. If I go on voting faster then it regenerates, the voting power will go down until an equilibrium is reached.

That means you do not really have to worry about the numbers of your votes. The system adjusts. It just means that when you vote 20 times, your maximum giveable $ per vote will be 50% as if you would vote 10 times a day.

Voting power slider

If you are new you will not have one. You need about 300 SP (some say 400 or even 500 SP) until you see it. It will appear magically every time you click on vote. It looks like this:

The slider allows you to manually adjust your voting power for each upvote. (That is why I talked about full voting power above.) Just go after your feeling - how useful was or how much did you enjoyed what you just read?

Steemers may now need to get used to use the slider or think more about where they place their vote. I would prefer the first ;)
For a great, long, elaborate post, take 100%. For an informative, but short one maybe only 20%.

For Botusers

You may want to set your votes to 1/4 of what they were before, that should lead to the same result as before the hardfork.

Resteem???

If you are new, you may have seen this word and not knowing what it means (Don't ask me how long it took me to figure it out). Re-steem is sharing - you place the post in your timeline as if you would have written it. Your followers see it like any post you wrote in their "home" tab and you see it in your personal area under blog.

Let's have a look at what you can find under each post:

From left to right: payout (author + curation), number of upvotes, number of comment, resteem button, time since post, name of poster, category (first tag).

Click on the resteem arrow to resteem, very simple.

I hope you now know more!

Let's use this new knowledge of yours to upvote and resteem this post! ;)