You may be looking at the homepage of Steemit with your bug eyes and salivating mouth thinking "thousands of dollars for a simple post??" Although yes, some of it is liquid and valuable, I have been seeing many posts of people confused about how the payout works for Steemit. This is a TL;DR on realistic Steemit payouts:
50% of the total amount of money is available as Steem Dollars, available for immediate liquidation at the time of writing 1 to $0.90 on Poloniex. The other 50% is in Steem Power, which unlocks and vests over 104 weeks.
Assume you're receiving half of what the total number shows. 1 Steem Dollar is also currently worth $0.90 USD.
According to @dantheman, 50% of the amount shown goes to you, and 50% goes to the voters/commenters. Then 50% of your 50% of the posts's value is given to you in Steem Power, and the other half is given to you in Steem Dollars.
Here's the post I'm drawing that info from. If there's anything more recent, please update me!
https://steemit.com/steem/@dantheman/how-to-maximize-curation-rewards
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Actually it's 75% to the author (half in Power, half in Dollars) and 25% to curators (voters, Power only). The post you refer to discusses curation rewards only.
Here's some cheat sheet on rewards
Downvoting a post can decrease pending rewards and make it less visible. Common reasons:
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