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What is an “Upvote”?
An upvote on Steemit.com is very different than a vote on any other social-media website. Clicking that little arrow is much more than a “Like” on Facebook or a “Heart” on Instagram. On Steemit, votes are rewarded with STEEM!
In today’s Toolkit post, we’ll explain what an “upvote” actually is, where the rewards come from and and how they are distributed on the Steemit website.
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Where does the STEEM come from?
When you upvote someone’s post - that value is not being withdrawn from your personal account. (This is a common misunderstanding.) You’re not giving anyone anything from your personal savings or STEEM Power. Instead, you’re vote is actually tapping into a brand new pool of STEEM. There’s a fresh batch of STEEM produced everyday, and it’s called the daily rewards pool.
New STEEM tokens are being created all the time. The rewards pool is an amount of STEEM generated every day from inflation. Right now, several tens of thousands of STEEM tokens are being created every day (Approximagely 63,000/day. The percentage of yearly inflation shrinks incrementally as time goes on). This daily STEEM represents the pool from which your vote takes a certain amount and distributes it to where you’ve directed.
What happens when you vote?
When you click the upvote button you are telling the STEEM Blockchain, “this is where I want X amount of the daily rewards pool to go.” The amount that you’re able to direct is dependent on the amount of STEEM Power you have. So the more SP you have, the more of the daily rewards pool you can direct to posts you like! (Your vote is not affected by liquid STEEM or SBD
Curation Rewards
An upvote on Steemit is also a tool for you to earn curation rewards. Simply put, when a post or comment is paid out a portion of the rewards is redistributed back to the people that helped generate that amount. If you upvote a post, you’re effectively helping it gain visibility and support and you’re rewarded for that curation.
The amount you get back from a post you upvoted depends on a number of factors - how much the post made during payout, at what point in time you upvoted that post, the number of votes before you upvoted, voting power, and so on and so forth. Without going into too much detail, the following can be used as the basic rule of thumb-
The earlier that you vote on a potentially successful and highly rewarded post, the more you will make in curation rewards.
More source: https://steemit.com/toolkit/@sndbox/what-is-a-steemit-upvote-an-illustrated-guide