Please, do not upvote this post before you read it!

As it may change your voting strategy :)

When blogging platform just launched, I was surprised to see how much tokens one can earn having quite moderate amount of SP. But talking to others and observing how people spend their Voting power, I also realised how little they know about the rules of the game.

In this post I want to explain how voting reward is calculated and also share some of my thoughts about voting culture.

Short Intro: Post lifecycle

  • Anyone can write a post, the only rule is that you can’t create it more than once in 5 minutes.
  • When you vote for the post, some amount of SP is added to the post payout.
  • You can vote with negative value as well(aka “Downvote”, “Flag”, “Report”). In this case some amount of SP is removed from post payout.
  • Full post lifecycle is 7 days starting from the moment of creation.
  • Anyone can vote for the post during 6,5 days.
  • If you vote during first 30 minutes, part of your curation reward will be given to the post Author.
  • During last 12 hours voting is disabled. During this period Blockchain recalculates payout.
  • At the end of 7 days period, post receives its payout.
  • Payout is distributed between Author and Curators in a 75% | 25% proportion.
  • After payout, you can still vote for the post, but it will receive no additional payout.
  • Anyone can write comments to the post and vote for comments.
  • Half of the comment reward goes to the comment parent. It can be either post itself or someone else’s comment.

Voting: How much Post will get from your vote.

When a person votes(let’s call such people Curators), some amount of SP is added to the post(let’s call it Curator’s Donation).

This amount is proportional to Curators SP and VP values. It also depends on the size of the Reward pool and total payout value of other posts.

Result SP can be calculated using this formula: SP • VP • K , where K is the modifier that changes over time and depends on Activity Reward Pool size and the amount of other active posts.

At the moment of writing this post K was around 0,011. In other words, if you vote for the post with 1000SP and full VP, 11SP will be added to the post.

K should decrease over time, as more and more posts will be competing for Activity Reward pool. But I think when advertising will be launched, the number should go up again because(according to the White Paper) 40% of all advertising money will go to Activity Reward pool.

There is one more thing that can influence the result. If you have more than 1000SP on your balance, a new option appears, allowing you to vote with % of your SP. So if you decided to vote with 42% you should multiply the result by 0,42.

Rewards: How much You will get from your vote

Every new vote adds its Curator’s Donation to the post. All these SP’s sums up in a Post Payout. At the end of 7 days period Post Payout will be distributed between Author and Curators. Each curator will get its share, let’s call it Curator’s Reward.

Unlike the Curator’s Donation, Curator’s Reward strongly depends on the time when vote happened, size of the vote compared to others and the order of the vote.

Let's first look into the timing first.

During first 30 minutes part of the Curator’s Reward will go to the post author.There is a simple formula to roughly calculate how much you will receive - multiply your Curator’s Reward by M÷30, where M is the time in minutes since post creation.

Now let’s see how the order of the vote and Curator’s Donation influence the result.

Each time a vote happens, some value is calculated and assigned to Curator. This value depends on the Curator’s Donation and current Post payout value. This number does not change over time. Let’s call it Curator’s Weight.

If you are the first voter, your weight is proportional to the square root of your donation.




When there were votes before yours:






Now that we know the weight of each curator we can calculate the Reward. It is proportional to curator’s weight over the sum of all curators weight.

Where w is curator’s weight.

Note that you do not need to calculate most of the values, as they are already provided by blockchain. Each post contains the list of active_voters. Each voter has its weight already calculated and rshares value which is exactly curators SP • VP • 50000000.

I am using “≈” in my formulas. That is because the square root function that is used in blockchain differs from the usual one used in calculator. This difference is not significant and using normal square root function will give you about 95% accuracy.

Now you know how things work, it is time to make conclusions :)

Voting Strategy and Culture

I am going to share my personal thoughts and ideas, please do not consider them as a call to action.

There are many posts written about low quality content, self upvote during the first minute, upvoting your own comments etc. All these things are bad for the community and can potentially destroy it.

Let’s take a look at self upvoting (especially during first minute).

What happens when author upvotes his own post with big amount of SP?

  • he gets 100% reward from his donation
  • his post will appear in hot section.
  • he will get the biggest curation bonus.

Pretty cool, but what also happens:

  • people with small SP will not upvote him as it does not make any sense
  • people who are against self upvoting might ignore the post at all.
  • person himself will not use his SP to upvote others content.

But what if the same user will spend his SP differently?

  • he still gets 75% of the post reward
  • he gives people with small SP a chance to discover his post and promote it, thus encouraging them to do so again.
  • there should be no one against him (from voting perspective)
  • he can use his SP to promote others content, thus making the system better and earning money himself.

I have a strong belief that by not upvoting your own content you can actually make more money in the end. Although self upvoting can make sense sometimes, when author is trying to promote his post. It can always happen that a good post was not discovered during a 30 mins period. In this case author can help it a bit. Also it can be reasonable to upvote your post close to the end of 7days period, as in this case everyone will win.

Here is a good video about the concept I am trying to explain.

So using your SP to promote others content, should potentially lead to more users in the system, advertisement interest and cash flow, worthy rewards and high SCR price.

These are my thoughts. Tell me what you think about it in the comments. 

Resources used to create this post:

An Illustrated Guide to Curation - from the simple to the complex - with real examples from past posts - Part 1

An Illustrated Guide to Curation - from the simple to the complex - with real examples from past posts - Part 2

Scorum White Paper