Everything you need to know about potential payouts and flagging (for new users)
The size of the pie is fixed, but how it gets sliced is not.
Every day, a fixed amount of money is allocated to the "rewards pool". These are the coins that get distributed to authors and curators for posting and voting on content. When users upvote or downvote posts, they are not adding or taking money away from the rewards pool. They are only changing how the pool is divided.
If there is $7,000 in the rewards pool for the day - then that $7,000 is split across all of the active posts based on how many upvotes/downvotes they receive. If there is a post with a pending payout of $500, then that means there is only $6,500 left to be paid to all the other posts.
"Potential Payouts" can go up or down until the payment window closes.
The amount that is shown next to a post is a "Potential Payout". This is an estimated value of how much money the post will make based on the votes that have occurred so far. Until the payout window closes though, this value can go up or down.
- If a post receives more upvotes, the potential payout of the post can go up.
- If a post receives more downvotes, the potential payout of the post can go down.
- If other posts receive more upvotes, the potential payout of the post can go down.
- If other posts receive more downvotes, the potential payout of the post can go up.
- If upvotes are removed from a post, the potential payout of the post can go down.
- If downvotes are removed from a post, the potential payout of the post can go up.
- If the price of STEEM goes up, the potential payout of all posts can go up.
- If the price of STEEM goes down, the potential payout of all posts can go down.
Payouts are split between authors and curators.
Up to 25% of a post's payout is awarded to curators (the people who upvoted the post) as a reward for discovering the content. The other 75% is awarded to the author. If curators vote for a post within the first 15 minutes of it being created, a portion of their curation reward remains in the rewards pool for other authors/curators.
Stakeholders are voting to decide on how the pie gets sliced.
The platform is filled with tons of users, who all have different opinions on how the posts should get paid. The rewards are decided based on the collective wisdom of the group. Some users may feel certain content is more valued than others, and it is up to them to use their upvotes/downvotes accordingly to spread the rewards how they see fit.
A downvote/flag does not mean you did something wrong.
There are many users in the community who recommend only using the flag/downvote on posts that are abusive/bad. It is up to you if you want to follow this etiquette.
Just because you received a downvote/flag does not mean that you did something wrong. They may have just been voting to reallocate the rewards in a way that they felt was more beneficial to the other active posts in the platform. Often users will leave a comment explaining why they downvoted/flagged, but sometimes they might not. If they left a reason, it is up to you to determine if you did anything wrong, and if there is anything you want to change.
Larger stakeholders have more say in how the rewards are divided.
A user with more SP is going to have a larger influence on the way rewards are allocated compared to users with less SP. If you don't like how a particular user has voted, you can counter their vote by voting the opposite way. If they have more SP than you, then your counter will not have as big of an effect. One vote from a user with a lot of SP can often have more of an effect than 100 votes from users with a small amount of SP.
You can buy more SP if you would like to have more power / influence / say.
The platform does not require that anybody purchase SP in order to participate, and there are many users who have become successful on the platform without investing any of their own money. If you would like to increase your voting stake though, then you have the option of purchasing more Steem Power through your Steemit wallet.
(Image Creative Commons CC0 from https://pixabay.com/)
Remember to vote for witnesses!
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
If you aren't sure who to vote for, check out this Witness Voting Guide.
This is really helpful. I was worried why my rewards are getting low. Now I understand everything. Thank you.
Welcome :)
Thank you for this clear and very understandable explanation. Unfortunately it leaves me with yet another question...
I was thinking about the issue yesterday already and today I more or less accidentally came across a video clip, which confirms my worries. A famous person opened an account on steemit, got the word out and within a day made close to 15,000.- Dollars.
Now, please don't get me wrong, its not like I don't want that man to have it. My question is, what happens, when the real top superstars pop up here? Millions of fans upvoting most of the "pie" to their accounts? According to what you said, it looks like it will just be like in the real world then... the stars and the rich get even richer and the little guy is left with some crumbs..
Or, what if someone decides to build some kind of "vote farm"... supposedly, there are places in low wage countries, where hundreds of "kids" like away all day for fb users buying likes. Could a similar system "harvest" rewards here like that?
I hope you don't think, I'm just some greedy person who is afraid of not getting enough. Although its a wonderful feeling, to get rewarded for quality interaction, I truly enjoy all the wonderful content I find around here and the conversations are much better than on any other social media platform.
If anyone could help me with my questions, put my mind at ease or point out that I'm simply missing something, I'd be very thankful :-)
Really good questions. @stellabelle created a good post several months back talking about that - what would happen if celebrities signed up. To some extent, it is unknown. A lot of it depends on how the community handles it. A lot of what you described is a possibility though. We'll have to see.
Thank you very much for your quick reply and for not making me look too stupid. At least one is aware of the situation. I hope good and fair solutions will be found.
If it wasn't so sad, it would almost be funny how human nature seems to always find ways to ruin a wonderful thing with greed. Hope the community will find ways, to defend itself.
Trying to find the post you mentioned
Those vote farm would require participants with some voting power to have any effect. So the celebrity would need to spend quite some steem to power up his vote farm. Eventually such manipulations would drive the price for steem up. This would ultimately benefit all, wouldn´t it?
Hm... I think I get your point. I thought of the celebrity thing and the vote farm of being two issues of their own. The celebrities would likely get upvoted by a wide range of fans, with all kinds of voting power.
The vote farms I thought, would be a "business" in a gray zone market. The "employees" could upvote each other for a start... just imagine you have a few hundred "kids" doing that and then use their "power" to make money for the "business"... not sure if I make any sense..
I ike the picture, masses of "kids" sitting one next to the other in huge internet cafes and voting like crazy. Like those world of warcraft-players who dig something or earn items in order to sell them to western WoW players with less time but more money. But how to incentivize those mass-voters, when they themselve never get upvoted because they don´t contribute meaningful content? To calculate how much initial vests they need to create a self-sustaining dynamic of a revoting network is beyond my math skills :-)
And then comes in addition the issue with the voting bots which adds a level of complexity...
Understand what you are saying and it gives hope in a way, that it shows other systems haven't been brought down by similar behavior.
When I talked about vote farms I was referring to something I read, when people started to buy likes and fans for their facebook accounts. The article was about what they called "like farms". We are talking about kids in the poorest countries in the world, who'd never own their own cell phone or a computer. If they'd get a fraction of the profits they generate, I think they'd surely enough be highly motivated...
On a different not... may I ask what your profile picture shows?
We will see how it will evolve, if there is a way to exploit or abuse a system (the voting system in this case), unfortunately sooner or later somebody will find a way to do so.
Sure, it shows Takamatsu Toshitsugu, one of the greatest masters in Ninjutsu, and supposed to be the last real Ninja
http://www.angelfire.com/mi/budotaijutsu/Takamatsu.html
He is a model in many ways: self-disciplined, always modest&respectful but very skillful, and deadly if needed
Yes, we'll see :-) I have hopes, that community will "defend" itself though.
Thanks for the info on aster Takamatsu Toshitsugu... I thought it was an aikido master, but the picture is too small for me to accurately judge.
Would be a model for me to! Although I like the philosophy in aikido, where the opponent is supposed to remain unharmed
Thanks timcliff for this article. Helps little minnows like myself understand more how everything is distributed. Also gives me more motivation to keep working harder to create more substantial and worthy content. Kudos!!
Great post!
I was just thinking about this the other day and how much I'd love to see a dynamic visualization of the rewards pool. I was imagining something that showed each post as a circle with the size of the circle representing the potential payout amount. The circles could be all arranged in a column which could add up to to the total current rewards pool. The small payout posts on the bottom would bunch up together with the largest post at the top being the biggest circle. I'd love to see something like that. On mouse over it could show the author, the title of the post, and a link.
Anyone up for building it?
I cant wait for Ai programmers who will be able to take our ideas and do all the programming work for us
Hey, look at that! A user/witness who understands what "flags" are and how the pool works!
Maybe you can teach the aspiring witnesses about this? I don't think they got the thousands of memos.
Hehe, thanks! I'm technically in the "aspiring witnesses" category myself though ;) I'm hoping this post will help a lot of people better understand how it all works.
My plan is to get this up onto the Welcome Page, so users who take the time to review the content there will start out on the 'right' track.
This is a good idea to get it (or trimmed down similar) on the welcome page. I have only been here a couple weeks but this is the first time I felt I have an understanding of what is going on with the votibg and flagging. One thing I can't work out is how to see all voters. It only ever shows the first view and +## but that doesn't expand to view all. Maybe it is just me.
There actually isn't a way through the Steemit.com interface, but if you use steemd.com, steemdb.com, or steemstats.com - you should be able to see more data there.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
Welcome :)
Great post. Thanks
Another very useful post from you, many thanks! One think I cant discover... if a reader resteems somebody's post after the final payouts have been made on it, does the author receive rewards from the resteemed version?
No. Resteeming is just sharing the post with your followers. It does not affect the post payout in any way, other than giving the post more views. If the views occur after the payout has ended, then any upvotes will not add to the rewards.
Ah, so we need to resteem fast if author is to benefit as much as possible. Thanks for that
Just reading an excellent post of yours from last year..."Everything you need to know about potential payouts and flagging (for new users)" - Could you put me straight: Would it not be a good idea to make old post continue to earn? I think yes! - or make it possible to resteem them to re-activate their earnings for authors and curators and to help get the post back into circulation if it is truly useful and wanted. I believe like copywriter of a good book the author/curators should continue to earn as long as people enjoy the post. Your thoughts on this and whether it would be beneficial to steemit would be really appreciated!
thank you for all your wonderful work!
all the best
It has been suggested/requested by many before. It is not that it is a 'bad' idea, but there are a lot of complications with it. One of them is abusive users can vote for their own post, power down, power up a new account, then vote for their post again. They can keep milking rewards forever without adding any new content. There are some other complexities with it as well, like increasing the amount of computations required by the blockchain to calculate rewards.
Hi timcliff, Thank you so much for your reply... ah i see - i did worry there might be such problems - but worth resolving how ever difficult i think. Perhaps through flagging this could be controlled - Btw this leads to another massive point.... flagging must be dangerous for many users if the other party decides to make problems for them - for the reason i think there should be Steem Police! Perhaps with a less repugnant name like Admin hehe... but i believe users need a higher power that can flag and remove bad users and spammers - without any danger of abuse to users. This is perhaps more important than my resteem comment - your thoughts? Is there such people to contact if one runs into nasty/abusive users?
I have had no problems like this on steemit ... but i have read ausbitbanks girlfriend saying she has been severely harassed by a user nogonoo or similar name, from memory!
thank you for your time!
There is actually - SteemCleaners.
Ah thank you ... i had wondered what they did!
I think your post is very straightforward and helpful.
I would add one last thing to in order to round it out and make it more personable.
If every whale had access to a large amount of emotional intelligence, I think the system would function much better. For example, reducing rewards for someone who just lost their job and who has never trended before with a high payout would have a much higher collateral damage rating than reducing rewards for someone who is currently being well paid and always trends. The additional element of emotional intelligence can make a huge difference in a platform that at its root is SOCIAL.
Hopefully in situations like that, the community/ whales can counter a single bad vote from one whale. In most cases, it only takes one whale to undo whatever action another whale did that the community disagrees with.
What happens after the 7(?) day payment window closes? What if a post goes viral 6 months later? Does the author get rewarded in anyway for that?
No, although if there are new comments made in reply to the post, those comments can get paid out.
Am I right in thinking that they will at least get a reputation bonus? I'd hope they get something out of it (other than regular exposure).
I'm actually not 100% sure on that, but I don't believe it does. Currently the platform is more driven towards building followings and getting more readers for your new content. If an old post went viral, they would most likely at least earn a lot more followers.
a couple of answers for me. thank you!