As we began discussing the idea of our own Shadow Token last week, @alphacore raised some really good points.

From all of this, we have implemented a big change to how we calculate up vote strength for each Caster.

The old system

We simply took your Shadow Rank and divided it by the Shadow Divider. So someone at a 25 Shadow Ranks with the current Shadow Diver being 5 gave them 5% up vote strength from other Casters on their posts (assuming they are over the Fractional Voting Level).

Why this system is not ideal

This system worked for a while and helped us grow together faster, but as we are expanding it no longer is operating on the principles and fairness ShadowBot was founded on! Consider this:

Two new members join ShadowBot, one who has just 18 Steem Power and another who has 25,000 Steem Power. Should both be treated equally? Tricky question, since we aim to balance good content while also being fair to the person with thousands more SP; they should get something for it, especially in the beginning since Powering Up is a commitment to Steem itself!

Having a lot of SP means you either worked hard and built it up and/or invested your money in, either way you put your hard earned capital into steem and should have some reward for it!

The new system

Our new system incorporates your Steem Power along with your Shadow Rank to more fairly allocate voting power across all members! We take your Shadow Rank and your Steem Power together to determine a much fairer up vote strength for each Caster.

Now a new member with just 25 Steem Power will get about 0.1% per post, where as a new member with 12,000 Steem Power would receive 4.9% up vote strength per post. The old model would have given both exactly the same amount. See Examples of Voting Allocations Here.

Will this effect how Shadow Rank is calculated?

NO! We did not make a single change to how Shadow Rank is calculated! That is the beauty of this system. We simply changed how we calculated the strength a given post would get from another Caster! Your ability to earn Shadow Rank is still exactly the same as it always has been!

The geek part

The old equation:

Voting Power Strength = ShadowRank / ShadowDivider

The new equation:

Voting Power Strength = ( ( ShadowRank + (SteemPower / (FractionalVotingLevel / ShadowDivider) ) ) / 2) / ShadowDivider

Full Size

You can use the following python code to replicate the math/algorithm we are using now:

SHADOW_DIVIDER = 5
FRACTIONAL_VOTING_LEVEL = 1250
FVLSD = FRACTIONAL_VOTING_LEVEL/SHADOW_DIVIDER

shadow_rank = 99
steem_power = 9862

vote = round( ( ( ( shadow_rank + (steem_power/FVLSD) ) / 2 ) / SHADOW_DIVIDER), 1)

print (vote)