# 5. Voting

In the last lesson, you learned all about the social functions that your Steemit account may perform, with the exception of voting. We'll talk about voting in this lesson in detail so you will be an expert on voting in no time.

Here's what you'll learn:

* How voting works
* Why voting power is important and how it affects your vote's value
* How voting power depletes and restores
* How voting strength is different than voting power
* How voting strength impacts voting power
* What a voting slider is and how to get one

## Voting

Voting is probably the single most important social function on Steemit since it is how users assign value to other users' posts, and how post authors receive rewards from the blockchain.

Learning how the voting system works can be one of the more challenging aspect of Steemit, but once you've mastered it, you'll have no problems at all seeking out and rewarding great content across the platform.

At the bottom of each blog post and comment, you'll see a small button:


This is the upvote button. It's what you click to show your approval of someone's post and to give the post rewards based on your SP. Keep this in mind as you read through this post. The value of your vote is always directly dependent on the amount of SP available to you. Votes on Steemit have value, unlike upvotes on Reddit, likes on Facebook and Instagram, and favorites on Twitter. However, before you go vote on every single post that you enjoy, you must understand the restrictions surrounding voting.

### Voting Power (VP)

In order to prevent everyone from voting all the time, Steemit has a restriction of sorts that is imposed on an account's ability to vote. It's called voting power. At any given moment, your account has a voting power statistic. This value, a percentage between 0 and 100%, does not appear anywhere on Steemit.com, so you must look elsewhere to find out what it is. Take a moment to browse over to Steemd.com. Input your username and look at the information that appears. On the left side of the page, you'll see several statistics. First, you'll notice your current amount of STEEM Power (SP). Beneath that value, you'll see a blue bar with a percentage on it. This is your account's voting power.

If you haven't yet cast a vote on Steemit, this bar will be at 100%. When you begin casting votes, you'll want to come back to Steemd.com to keep an eye on your voting power. Each time you cast a full strength upvote (we'll talk about voting strength in the next section), your voting power depletes by 2%. As your voting power decreases, so does the value that you are able to give to another post.

As an example, let's consider an account that has 500 SP and has full voting power. At the time this post was written, this user's full upvote would be worth around $0.12. If this user casts 5 votes on posts they like, this will lower their voting power by 10% to 90%.


At 90% voting power, a full vote from this user's account is now only worth $0.10.


This value will continue to decrease as voting power decreases (This example was calculated using @penguinpablo's [Upvote calculator.](https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html) If you'd like to try more examples, vary the voting power number on the calculator.)

How does VP replenish? It's easy to regain your voting power on Steemit. Simply don't vote on anything. Voting power replenishes at a rate of 20% every 24 hours, so if you don't vote during that period, your voting power will return to 100%. Therefore, you'll find many people on Steemit who avoid giving more than ten full strength upvotes each day, since that depletes voting power down to 80% and allows recovery within the next day.

Ultimately, it is up to you to decide how much to vote. Keep in mind, though that the more you vote, the less your vote is worth. It's generally a good idea for new users to follow the ten votes per day rule. Once you begin voting regularly, there are several tools to use to keep track of your voting power to make sure you aren't getting carried away. I've already mentioned [Steemd.com,](https://steemd.com) but you may also check [SteemNow.com](https://steemnow.com) or [SteemWorld.org.](https://steemworld.org) All of these sites have other features that help you with your account as well, and we'll talk about those in later lessons.

### Voting Strength (or Percentage)

As a new user, chances are you won't need to worry about voting strength right away, but nevertheless, it is incredibly important for understanding how voting on Steemit works. When you vote for the first time, you'll notice that after you click the upvote button, you might see small swirling graphic for a moment, and then the upvote button will turn solid green. This means you have given the post or comment an upvote. Once your account reaches 500 SP, you'll notice a voting slider will appear after you click on the upvote button. The value shown on this slider is your voting percentage.


Voting percentage is another value from 0 to 100 that allows a user to use smaller portions of their voting power to give value to a post. This number is always independent of voting power, but the value given by any vote still depends on the overall voting power of an account.

This can initially be a confusing concept, so let's take a look at an example using @penguinpablo's [Upvote Calculator.](https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html):

Consider the user we discussed in the previous section who just arrived at 500 SP. He now has access to the voting slider, so he can change his voting percentage. He has waited since voting so that his voting power has recharged to 100%. Let's say he decides he wants to vote on a great post he just found, so he moves the slider to 50%. He will be voting at 50% voting strength with 100% voting power. This means his vote will be worth $0.06 instead of the $0.12 it was worth at 100% voting strength.


Remember that while a 100% vote depletes VP by 2%, a 50% vote would only deplete voting percentage by 1%. The amount of VP that depletes scales linearly with your voting percentage, e.g. a 25% vote would decrease VP by 0.5%, while a 1% vote would decrease VP by 0.02%, and so on. Therefore, you are able to give more low percentage votes each day than the ten if you always voted at 100% voting strength. This comes at the cost of the value you impart to the posts you vote on.

#### Play around with the [Upvote Calculator](https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html) to get an idea of how voting percentage and voting power impact your votes' values.

If you are using Steemit.com to cast votes (there are other sites you may browse the STEEM blockchain with, and we'll talk about them later, of course), as a new user you will always cast votes at 100% voting strength. However, like voting power, voting strength is a number that can vary between 0 and 100%. So why do new users always cast at 100%, and how can you change this?

The short answer is that new users always cast 100% votes because of their low amount of SP. If you haven't invested any STEEM of your own into your account, you'll begin with a very low value of SP available to you in your account. This means that your vote will not be worth much at the beginning. Therefore, decreasing your voting percentage gives an even smaller amount of value to other posts.

The road to 500 SP may seem very long, but don't worry. If you want to get a taste of the voting slider without reaching 500 SP, we'll discuss some tools in a later lesson that will let you do just that. For now, I advise sticking to the ten votes per day rule. It will allow you to give the maximum value to others' posts.

# You're Almost Ready to Take Steemit by Storm!

That's right, you're just one lesson away from sharing your first blog on Steemit and starting to make waves among other users! Be sure to look back over this lesson and ensure that you understand the following:

* What voting power is
* What voting strength is
* How voting power and voting strength are different
* When you can expect the vote slider to appear
* How voting power depletes and replenishes

If you're still unsure of some of these concepts and terms, don't worry. You will understand better once you get started! So without further ado, let's go prepare your first Steemit blog post!