A minnow's secret to success

Good evening steemit community, how much it has evolved since even me, a minnow barely over three months old, has joined this revolutionary drive. As we all know, HF19 is all the rage and we are all quite excited to see the changes in effect. So far the reviews are good but I suspect that this is the silver lining at the edges of a dark cloud for many.

Why you may ask? Well, first of all, your voting power and rewards have gone up significantly, post HF 19 and this is a good thing. If you didn't know, you can vote for a limited amount of times, based on your present voting power. (Your voting power can be checked at steemd.com/@username) your voting power can be thought of as a bar that has 100% voting power when full, and every time you vote, you use a little bit of this bar till its empty. At that point, you must regenerate before you can vote again. I believe the current rate of regeneration is around 20% every 24 hours.

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This means that before HF 19, every person would vote at 0.5% of their total voting power until they have acquired enough steempower to gain the voting bar. I believe this happens at 500SP. (I do not have one yet xD) After HF 19, and part of the reason why your votes visibly increase a post's payout compared to before, is that your votes now use an entire 2% of your voting power bar.

This isn't all, as far as I understand, HF 19 has also changed the way curation rewards are shared. Post HF 19 rewards are calculated as a direct relation to your steempower. This may not make much sense unless you understand how it was done before, and the best way I can explain this is visually.

There are two lines in this graph, the red one represents the model for sharing the daily reward pool before hard fork and the brown one shows the new distribution method imposed by HF 19( as I understand it) As I have heard them repeat it, they went from a quadratic distribution curve to a linear distribution curve. Meaning that instead of your rewards relying on the square of your sp, it is now directly related to it.

Think of it this way, if my sp is 2, and yours is 10. Before HF, your rewards would have been a factor of 10 squared, or 100, mine would have been a factor of 2 squared, or 4. After hardfork, the rewards are simply calculated based on my 2 and your 10. This is why we all have the ability to increase the rewards on posts, no longer are we denied a share of the daily reward pool because we simply haven't crossed the steempower threshold yet.

Now to the meat of the matter!

Now to the meat of the matter. We are all minnows, most of us new, many of us here alone,( believe me, I've tried inviting people too, their day will come ;) ) we now have the ability to support and grow together. Do not attempt to chase after whales and high power accounts for their votes, if your content interests a user, their vote will come. It's really that simple. Another matter to consider is that votes are now more limited than ever as people will be carefully considering where their votes go. The influence of your votes has gone up, yes, but so has the value of the vote to the voter. I can see where this can create a shortage of votes, ultimately leaving many posts to suffer, lonely and voteless, a possible future for this post too xD.

Do not treat other steemit users like voting bots, only to exploit for the reward their votes provide, they are REAL PEOPLE. Spend time and get to know your community, reach out to people, respond when people reach out to you. Do some networking, or join a contest!

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Look around and find materials and groups that interest you and interact with them. Likely, they will share your interest and support you in return. If you are serious about steemit, you will know that its a long term investment. Slow down, breathe, learn, evolve, grow and we will all make it together.

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Now don't quote me on this, I gathered this through bits and pieces from reading posts. I'm not sure I ever quite got it all but this is what I grasp. At best, this will provide an idea of what is going on, from a minnow's perspective.

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