How to think about your upvotes after HF21 - a non-technical guide

There is still a lot of confusion, and a lot of questions, about how upvotes are now calculated under the new reward curve put in place since HF21. Very few people can actually perform the calculations "by hand" so let's forget the formulas and the graphs; this article is more an attempt to describe a heuristic method so that more users have a feel for what is going on.

I know that HF22 also took place but a lot of articles and discussions were about HF21, and especially the EIP, so we won't mention HF22 again.

Firstly, let's take a quick look at how curation rewards are calculated. I hope that most users now have a working model of how curation works when they upvote.

Your curation rewards depend on three things: the sum of existing votes before your upvote; the size of your vote; and the sum of the votes that come after yours. So, without any formulas you should have a pretty sound idea of how your curation rewards increase as more voters follow your vote.

Now, the new reward curve does something similar to rewards. No longer is your upvote a fixed value when voting, but its value changes depending on the behaviour of other users.

Turning your upvote into a payout involves essentially two processes: your upvote is turned into rshares that are added to the post; then at the end, those rshares are converted into STEEM and distributed to the author.

Sitting in the middle of those two processes is the "reward curve". Its function is to turn rshares into STEEM using whatever formula it is given.

Just before HF21, most users could ignore this reward curve function because it was linear and, to a decent approximation, the total pending rewards of a post was the sum of all the vote values. This is no longer the case, hence one needs a working model of what this new reward curve is actually doing.

So we need to hold in our mind an important distinction between our "vote value" and its corresponding "reward value" - they are no longer the same thing. The "vote value" is what the blockchain calculates from global parameters and your SP; think of this as your 100% potential "maximum vote value". The "reward value" is then what you actually see on a post after you have upvoted it.

This is where most people's shock response comes in - your upvote is worth less than you thought!

Yep, it is worth less.

So let's see why this has happened.

In general, the reward value of your upvote depends on the size of the upvote itself and on the total value of all the other votes, both before and after yours. Every fresh upvote moves the post rewards up the reward curve so that it gets closer to the linear relationship between vote value and vote rewards.

Like a rising tide raises all ships, so as the total rshares value of a post increases so does the reward value of every individual upvote in STEEM.

That most websites have chosen to show rewards in US$ just confuses this issue even further as this value also fluctuates with the STEEM market price. If you ignore this and just think in terms of STEEM then the rshares-into-STEEM process is fairly straightforward.

Again, under a linear reward curve, this step was simple and post rewards in STEEM would not fluctuate much during the 7-day life of a post. Now that process starts off being very non-linear, indeed quadratic, with a minimum "reward value" of just 50% then rising (very slowly) towards 100%, which means that the "reward value" would finally be equal to the "vote value".

Where does the 50% come from? It's how the reward curve formula is designed so that if the value of rshares is low then it approximates to half the linear value.

So, every new upvote on a post increases both the vote value of that post and its reward value as it climbs the curve from 50% to 100%.

Just as a numerical example, if you see your upvote should be worth 10 cents, but you upvote a new post early and you see that its reward value is only 5 cents, then that's correct! That's 50% of your "vote value" turned into "reward value". If you come back later to the same post and see many other votes, then look at the value of your own vote, you may see it has gone up to maybe 6 or 7 cents. Still below the 10 cents, but as the whole post value has moved up the reward curve so every upvote becomes worth that little bit more.

Hope that helps.

The take-away is that your upvote is worth more if the whole post is worth more.

The down-side to waiting to just upvote valuable posts is that you will be quite low down the curation reward curve, as that still depends on timing whereas upvotes themselves are not time-sensitive.

Any further questions, just ask.

PS. Have now posted a follow-up: Why do SteemWorld and SteemNow show different values for my upvote?. Hope these two articles, together, help users understand the changes.

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