From a post I wrote recently, where I talked about some reasons why you might not be getting upvotes (Spanish only... Sorry!), I realized that there are many things that are not clear, both for new users, and for many other hivers who have long time active on this social network.
It is surprising to see how many users make "inappropriate" use of their votes. And I use this definition for using some, because I realize that in most of these cases what one can perceive is a total ignorance of what voting is, what it produces and the optimal way to use it.
The first case I will mention is that of users who do not vote. Among these there are some that I would place on a kind of blacklist (😉), because they are users who live on the hunt for upvotes and post like crazy in order to get more, but for some strange reason they don't upvote any other posts. You can see that from so many upvotes received, they have high HP, but they left it there, wasting all the VP amount that is automatically regenerated. Because remember that every minute the vote Mana is replenished, that is, what you have spent voting is replenished at a constant rate, which is about 20% of your total VP. If you use that 20%, it is replenished and if you don't use it, it is simply wasted, since it cannot be accumulated. Therefore, a user who does not vote, is simply denying others what he does ask for himself.
On the other hand there are those who consider their vote worthless and they think therefore it does not make sense to vote. Well, these are not far from the previous ones. Each vote has a value and does contribute. The only thing is that the amount can be very small and you can't see the effect when you vote, but it adds up.
I take this opportunity to clarify that a positive vote cannot reduce the amount of rewards of a post. There are people who have told me that when they vote for a publication, the amount decreases. The only way this would happen is if the curator (that is, the person who is voting) had voted with a higher percentage before and now he is voting a second time, the same post, with a lower percentage.
But in most cases what it's all about is this. The value of the rewards (the amount that appears at the end of the post) is tied to the value of the currency according to the exchange rate, so it is possible that, even without receiving votes, that amount may vary due to the fluctuations of the cryptom currencies. So it's not surprising that we see the amount of a post rise or fall, suddenly, without any apparent explanation. And this can coincide with the moment we make our vote, since at that moment, the page communicates with the server and is an opportunity to update that information.
As I said before, not voting is a fact that harms the community, because you are letting a "money" go that could be rewarding an author. But there are people who don't have the time or patience to look for content to vote on, every day. For them, this is the solution.
The trails are a route for the votes. By following one of these, our own votes follow that route. That is, if the trail I follow votes for a post by the user "xyz", I automatically vote for that post too.
The ideal is that we follow a community or a user that we trust and that we know is voting quality content, because if that vote goes to a plagiarist or a spammer, then our vote will also be present there.
Following a trail is a vote of confidence and, at the same time, a support to that community, because their vote is strengthened by being followed by others. An example of this can be seen in 
As the total sum of all those votes is higher, the percentage to be distributed among the curators is also higher, so each curator is more likely to get paid for having voted. Therefore, it is a win-win bet.
The way to follow the trails is on the website https://hive.vote
This is a wonderful, but delicate service, so it's good to seek advice, in case you don't understand something.
Once there, in the "trails" section, you can look for the ones that are already established and follow them. Remember to set the percentage you will follow them with, according to your interests and possibilities!
There are two percentages linked to the vote and this usually leads to quite a lot of confusion. I will try to be as clear as possible.
One of them concerns what is called the "Mana" of voting, which we are going to call the "Voting Power". As I explained above, we have a certain amount of liquidity available to us on a daily basis, which is renewed minute by minute.
Depending on the number of times we vote per day, this amount decreases, in a proportion that I will explain a little later. But simultaneously it is being renewed or regenerated at a constant rate.
This voting power is consumed when we vote and is replaced as the minutes go by.
On https://beeme.icu/?account=ylich (if you put your username instead of mine, you can see the status of your account) this voting power is expressed on the big wheel.
On https://hiveblocks.com/@ylich it’s on the left too, where it says "Voting power".
The second percentage I want to refer to is the percentage we use to vote on a publication.
All the users that come to the platform have the unique option to vote 100%. That is, every time a new user votes for a post or comment, they are voting at 100%, with no option to set a different amount. This is in Hive, since other applications like Peakd.com and eSteem, do give the option to vary the amount.
But this is not arbitrary, the idea is that someone with low HP, that is to say that their account does not have much weight, should vote 100% in order for their contribution to be significant.
When you reach 500 HP, you are automatically presented with the option to vote with a slider at Hive, where you choose the percentage you want to vote with each time.
These are the two factors that work with percentage voting: the one we have to vote (voting power) and the one we want to use in a post or comment.
Now that we understand the percentages, it is important to clarify the importance of administering the votes.
Regardless of your HP, approximately 20% of your voting power will be replenished daily. Therefore, if you consume 60% in one day, you need three days to replenish it, but if you keep voting the next day, you keep lowering your voting power until it loses all its value. At the end of this, your vote will only have a symbolic meaning (it will be like a Facebook like), but it will not contribute to the author of the post and you will not be eligible for curation rewards either.
This is why we should not spend more than 20% in one day!
Each 100% vote (the percentage we choose), consumes 2% of our total voting power. This means that in order not to exceed 20% per day, we cannot vote for more than 10 posts (or comments) per day.
I insist, this is if we vote at one hundred percent. If we are going to use a lower percentage, what we have to do is do the calculation. The simplest formula is to calculate it as points. If we know that 10 votes at 100% is the maximum, we can establish that it is:
10 * 100 = 1000 points that we have daily.
| So we can do | ||
|---|---|---|
| 20 votes at 50% | -> 20*50 | = 1000 |
| 40 votes at 25% | -> 40*25 | = 1000 |
| 33 votes at 30% | -> 33*30 | = 990 ≈ 1000 |
All these amounts are approximate, because in reality the recovery process is a little faster, so it is possible to vote "a little more", but we must try not to fall below 80 our voting power.
It is usually by following one of these that the users' mathematics get entangled.
The most common mistake is to follow several voting "routes", because it turns out that if I tell three trails to vote at 50%, they will consume 150% of my voting power daily. After several days my VP will be at 0%.
Hive.vote allows us to set a point for the system to stop voting for us, which is pre-set at 70%. This means that when our VP reaches that amount, our votes will stop. That eliminates the risk of our VP going down too low, but it'll keep talking abd about "our math skills". What we must place there is the amount that "must be".
For example, in my case I allocated 66.66% for the trail of
One aspect to take into account, when following a trail, is to see with what percentages they vote. Because there are communities that vote many publications a day and in order to do so they must do it with lower percentages (as I explained in the table above). And our vote will follow that vote in a proportional amount. So if I'm following a community with my vote at 50% and they vote 100 posts at 10%, I'll be within the limit I set, but my vote will be 5% on each of those posts. Which, unless I have a very, very high HP, will be diluted, not contributing much to the post vote and not eligible for curation rewards.
So I recommend setting the highest amount you can and finding a community that also votes with the highest possible vote and is limited to 10 posts a day. Later on, with a higher voting weight, that is with a higher HP, if you want, you can follow several trails to do a more extensive work and support more users.
Following several trails can have an additional negative effect, which I discovered by looking at the votes I receive.
There is one user who placed me in her fan base, so as soon as I publish, I get a 40% vote of her. But she follows several trails of curation communities and does so with different percentages (lower, of course). So when I receive a vote from one of those communities, her vote is replaced by the lowest percentage she votes with in that community. So of the 40% I receive initially, in the end it leaves me a 6.75% vote.
The worst case is that the system consumes 40% of her first vote and then 6.75%, but the value she brings and the rewards she gets as a curator are over 6.75%. In this case she loses and I lose.
That's why one must choose very carefully and consciously, whether to follow a trail or not and analyze all those aspects.
But to go back to what was said at the beginning of this publication, the most important thing is to vote. It is an anti-social act not to do so (in my view) and it is an attack on the community. Just as you like to receive a vote, others also like to receive yours, however little you can contribute.
I believe that with this knowledge you can organize things in such a way that your vote is not lost and that you can take advantage of it, while at the same time making a contribution to other authors and the community in general.
@ylich