Voting on Steemit can be a confusing thing. Especially if you don’t understand how it all works. Steemit is a blockchain that is fueled by a cryptocurrency. Each week, currency is added to the general pool. When you vote, you are allocating a certain amount from that pool either toward or away from a post.

Voting is a great way to help you grow your Steemit account and gain more followers. It will also help you receive some rewards if the posts you vote on go viral. Watch this video to gain a deeper understanding of how voting works on Steemit.

Watch the video to learn all about voting on Steemit. If videos aren’t your thing then check out the transcript below to read more information on how voting works on Steemit.

Voting! Upvoting! Downvoting! What is it? How do you do it? And what can you do to make it the most advantageous for you? All that’s coming up next.

Hey guys, my name is Spencer Coffman. Thank you for watching this YouTube channel that’s all about making information known to you.

We’ve got software reviews, plugin reviews, online hints and tips, social media how to’s, and lots of information on how you can be successful on the steam it blogging platform so you can spread your message, grow your following, and start making money online.

Today we’re going to talk about voting. Now, voting on Steemit is something that you can do to show people that you like their posts.

In addition, it’ll help you build a reputation score, help you get more followers, and it will also help you get more people voting on your posts. Because if you vote on someone else’s post, chances are they may see that and vote on your post.

Not only that, but you can help keep Steemit a clean, safe, spam-free place by voting on those posts as well!

Now, what do you get for doing all this? Other than a better reputation score, more followers, potentially more votes on your posts, you can also get some money back. You will earn what’s called a curation reward. This is like an affiliate.

If you find a post and you vote on it early enough, and that post, let’s say, goes viral, then you will earn a percentage. And it’ll be a higher percentage because you found a post that a lot of people liked so you’re gonna get rewarded for having that foresight. That’s to recognize that that post was gonna be good.

It’s like you’re predicting the future. If you predict a post is gonna do well and you vote on that post then you’re gonna get a big reward because you voted early. But if you vote on a post that’s already doing well you’re not gonna get as big of a reward because it’s already doing well.

You didn’t really see much then, did you? So that is a kind of a nutshell on why you need to be voting on posts and what you can do.

Within voting, there are two things you can do. One would be upvoting, which is telling someone you like a post. The other one is downvoting, also called flagging. When you flag a post, you’re telling them it’s spam. It doesn’t belong on Steemit.

So when it comes to upvoting this is something where it’s like Facebook. Anytime you like someone’s post on Facebook you just click like. Now on Facebook, you can click like an unlimited amount of times. You can like all the pages, you can like all the posts, you can like everything. No big deal.

On Steemit, you can only do it a certain number of times. Now, that’s not quite true because you can do it an unlimited amount of times. The only difference is your value goes down each time you do it.

So the typical numbers are you can vote 10 times in a 24-hour period with your vote values staying and a pretty constant rate. If it’s, let’s say 5 cents, after your tenth time it may be down to 3 cents but it’s pretty constant.

Now if you’re a minnow, and your reputation score is like 30 or below, your votes probably aren’t even worth a penny yet. But if they are worth a penny and you vote 10 times, they will definitely only last maybe 5 votes at a penny and then the rest will be like fractions of a cent. No big deal.

The point is, you can vote about ten times and then you’ll be down to let’s say like a zero-rating. After that, you can keep upvoting. People will still get your upvote. It will still help their post because the more upvotes a post gets the faster and higher it can climb in the ranks etc.

However, you will not be attributing any value to that post. So after 24-hours, your value will regenerate and then you can vote 10 more times. So periodically check it.

When you get higher up in the ranks, when you become like dolphins whale stages, you will be able to have a slider where you can control exactly how much money you give to everybody in their upvote.

But for now, every time you vote it’s just a straight allocation of whatever is available. When you get bigger, you have a rotating slider. Usually, it’s when you hit about 500 Steem Power.

You will have that ability to allocate, let’s say, 10 cents to this guy, a penny to that one, a dollar to this one, and so on and so forth. You’ll still only be able to vote 10 times with that value.

Here’s a great resource by @simplymike on how to get a slider even if you don’t have 500 SP.

Now, where does this money come from? That’s the big question. Well, the good news is, it doesn’t come from you. It doesn’t cost you anything. It comes from a general pool of cash that’s generated every week.

Every week, the Steemit people generate a certain number of Steem and SBD, whatever type of currency, and they put it into the blockchain. It’s a limited amount. So that’s where this comes from.

It’s divided up between all the Steemit users. They all get a certain amount based on the reputation scores and how much Steem Power they have. So if you have a lot of Steem Power, you’re gonna get more of a voting power reward.

If you have a little bit of Steem Power, you’re gonna get less.

It’s all a fixed scale depending on your vote power. So if you’re high, you get more. If you’re low, you get less. And it’s incrementally even across the board. You vote ten times, you wear it down, it regenerates after 24 hours.

The thing is, since they only allow so much every week, or only release so much every week, then if all of it gets used up in the first three days, or the first five days, or the first day, more people keep voting throughout the week, obviously.

So where does that come from? Well, that comes from all of the money that was already attributed to previous posts. This is why, if you’re looking at some of your posts and you say, ‘hey, wait a minute, yesterday I had $2.00 on there today it’s only $1.89.’ Some of your money from that post was taken from you.

After one week you get paid out. After seven days because the new regeneration occurs. Every seven days, more money is released to the pool. Until that 7 day period, your post value can fluctuate because depending on the activity on your post, some money might get taken away and reallocated to more active posts.

This is why your value will fluctuate. This is why it’s also important for you to continue commenting, replying to comments, upvoting other people’s posts, all throughout the week-long period so your posts continue to grow in value.

The other side of voting is flagging. When you flag someone’s post, you are telling them it is spam and it does not belong on Steemit. You can get rewarded for doing this as well. You can flag people’s posts and put it in the comments.

There is a bot that’s out there, it’s called @steemcleaners. This place will review anything you flagged and they will determine whether it was a legitimate flag or whether it was a malicious flag. If it’s legitimate, you’ll get a reward for reporting that bad content.

Therefore, be very careful when you’re flagging someone. If you’re just flagging them because you don’t like them or because you don’t like what they’re doing, that’s not justifiable.

But if they’re posting something like racism, hate speech, pornography, or anything like that, definitely put a flag on their post and definitely report them to steem cleaners because then you will get a little bit of reward for doing that.

Now, if you’re flagging a post and you maybe want to explain why you’re flagging it, put a comment in there telling the person why you flagged their post.

If this is the case where you just don’t like something they said, put it in there and then if they change it, or if they reply to your comment, you can always go back later and remove that flag and then you could replace it with an upvote and another comment thanking them for making Steemit a better place, or whatever you’d like to do.

But the point is, be careful flagging. Make sure you’re only flagging on justifiable flags.

And then, as far as upvoting goes, vote on as many good posts as you can and do it early. If you do it within the first half-hour is really good, the first hour, the first day, really.

After a few hours, if you notice that there are quite a few upvotes, then you might be better off resteeming that post and upvoting it. We’re gonna talk about resteeming and the values of it in a later video.

For now, focus on following the people that you think are good authors and upvote their content early on. You can use bots to help you with this. We’ll talk about that in another video.

For now, basically, you have upvoting and you have downvoting, or flagging. Do them in moderation, do them with thought, and do them often and you will get good rewards for doing so.

I want to hear about anything that you have regarding voting in the comments below. If you have any questions at all on how it works, how often you can do it, your voting sliders, whatever the case may be. Post it down there.

Also, take the time to look at everybody else’s comments because there’s so much information there and you guys can learn a lot from each other. In addition, if this is your first time here on this channel I would love to have you subscribe.

It’s all about making information known to you so you can have the information you need to wisely decide on what tools you need to help you be successful online.

Until next time.