My advice is ignore it all! For real, it's pretty damn confusing and overly complicated. It's not going to make a huge difference for you in your first month here anyways and it will come.

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I suspect you really want to know anyways

Since you opened this post and read past the line that said ignore it all, your expecting something, so I'll try to simplify things.

Voting Power

You may have heard this mentioned at some point, but essentially everyday each user can cast 10, 100% upvotes, before you start depleting your voting power faster than it can replenish. Each vote drains about 2% of your voting power and takes about 2.4hrs to recharge. Votes casts at higher voting power will be worth more than votes cast at lower voting power. You will also earn curation rewards based on how much your vote was worth. So a lot of people try to keep there voting power between 90-95%, or if your really precise like 95-98%.

But you can't even see your voting power on Steemit, you need to use a third part site like steemnow.com or steemd.com to be able to see it.

Here's what it looks like on Steemnow.com

Voting Weight

When you first start out and until you have about 500SP, all your votes are cast at 100%, around 500SP you will get a vote slider, where you can pick what strength or weight to cast you votes at. This makes it possible to stay in the zone up in the mid 90s for voting power.

It looks like this.

Told you confusing right

This is why I say don't worry to much, when your first here, just have fun, vote away! Once you have that slider you can actually stay in the range.

The only reason to keep in the zone of voting power is to ensure your votes are worth as much as the can be and you earn the most curation rewards, but honestly your vote is worth like half a cent to 2 cents it's really not worth killing your brain over. Be aware of it, learn about it, but don't worry so much until it counts.

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But what about Curation

Any guess what my answer is?

It's pretty damn confusing and overly complicated and it's not going to make a huge difference for you, so ignore it

Sound familiar, I'm sure you really want to know. So here the easy explanation on how curation rewards work. Everyone who votes for the post gets a very small portion of the payouts depending on when you voted and how much. But this when and how much gets confusing. It's very best if your the first person to vote you will get larger rewards, and the best time to vote is exactly 30 minutes after the post was made. If you vote before 30 minutes you forfeit a small portion or your curation rewards to the author. I believe at 15mins, it's 50/50 and closes more before that with more going to the author. You will also get more rewards if the post pays out a higher amount, but if it does your vote was probably so small anyways it's not going to matter much anyways. Curation rewards are very small and should not be a focus early on. I don't think it even becomes important until you have at least 20 000SP, then you may start seeing rewards that matter.

Anyways this post probably confused you, the damn curation stuff still confuses me and most people, so really don't focus on it

If you are new Here I have a couple other great posts to help get you started.

The art of Making good comments

Advice and Suggestions for new Steemit Users

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