Starting out Steemit can be a little overwhelming for a number of reasons. I thought it might be helpful to just run through a few concepts quickly as I think of them. Maybe it is useful. I hope so:
These are Steem Backed Dollars. The idea is they equal about $1 in value. The community pushes them to that value. That is their purpose. They provide a value close to the USD because crypto jumps around so much. It helps keeps things stable.
This is the cryptocurrency that Steemit works on. It is worth about $1.60 right now but has gone up to $2.70 or more. Think Bitcoin.
Steemit is simply an interface or front-end for working with STEEM and the blockchain. Nothing more. Think of it as a fancy cover. You could also use busy.org or chainbb.
So you have a voting percentage you can give on posts. Currently Steemit doesn't allow you to adjust that if you are below 450 STEEM in your account, but if you interacted with the blockchain through some other means you could. Because of this all of your votes are at 100% voting power.
This is the number you see by your name and probably between 25 - 70. It is how much the community likes you. It goes up as you get upvotes and comments and just engagement. It has a lot of factors but just know it is a quick gauge on how much value you bring.
This is how you award funds from the rewards pool (not out of your account!) to posts. You can upvote comments or posts. Pretty much anything. When you do this you are taking the amount of power you have which is determined by how much STEEM you own and applying it to that post or comment. That amount is then taken from the rewards pool and added to the potential value of that post. 25% ends up going to everyone that upvoted and then 75% goes to the author.
Another concept is that your voting power slowly goes down over time and then needs to re-energize. You can think of like power in a video game or turbo booster. As you use it then it goes down and you have to wait for it to refill. This helps control the amount of voting and serves as sort of a police of voting power.
I wanted to throw out one final thing. If you look right now the potential payout on a lot of posts are dropping. This is because the post is getting paid out in SBD and STEEM. So the value you see is a reflection of that posts value in SBD and STEEM as they stand in dollars. Now if the SBD or STEEM starts to drop (as it currently is) before this post is paid out then you will see a drop in value. Don't worry! Just keep trucking and posting! :)
