I apologize if this is common knowledge to the rest of you out there. I just learned this. I thought that voting for things was harmless. Well, it kinda is if you have your steem power delegated to you and every vote you make nets $0.00. Then, yeah, your votes are harmless.
Add some steem power (that you pay for yourself), and you lose your delegation. What's delegation? That's steem lending you a hand because without enough SP, you really can't do anything at all. Once you build up your own SP, then you don't need the delegation anymore, so you can wave goodbye to it. I've seen people with SP delegated after having lots of SP already. I have no idea how this is possible. Still a noob.
I learned from Steem Dollar how much my voting power is.
I also learned that with each vote, your voting power drops. It doesn't drop by very much. It is slight. Keep in mind that how much it drops is actually proportionate to how much voting effectiveness you apply. It's possible to reduce the amount of voting effective ness you apply on some sites. On steemit, it's at 100% no matter what. Some other sites like D.tube have a slider where you can adjust your voting effectiveness. The more effectiveness you use, the more your voting power will drop. You can actually use negative effectiveness. This also will drop your voting power. Negative effectiveness is essentially a down-vote.
It is possible to have 0% effectiveness and still have a positive or negative vote. There are $0 rewards from this though. The only reason I would see that anyone would want to do this is to give an up/down vote without impacting in anyway at all. Just for the sake of saying yay/nay.
You recover 20% of your effectiveness/day. At the time of writing this, I'm at 29.22% effectiveness. This means that tomorrow, I'll be at 49.22%. Furthermore, I think that the rate at which you recover your effectiveness is actually hourly. I'm not sure about that, but I have been watching my effectiveness intently, and I've notice it does go up periodically. It may be for other reasons though. Again, noob.
This was a huge game changer for me to realize this. Like I said before, I was just upvoting anything I liked. I didn't even have to like it a lot. Now that I know my votes aren't just worth a few pennies to other people, I will be more careful. I know now that my votes actually have value that can go down if I use them too much. I should be more selective about where I use it. The trouble with this though is that this forces me to abide by other rules:
If anyone out there knows a better way, let me know. I'm eager to learn and I do want to contribute to the community in a positive way.
