This is the post where I tell you why basically all of the math everyone uses for Steem posts is wrong. Is that enough of a clickbait opener?

So, we have 50/50 post payout as the default, and SBD is over $1 USD so just about everyone is using it. And we like to think about it paying out 50% SBD and 50% Steem Power, and all of our math assumes it pays out that way. Unfortunately, it doesn't.

The problem is curation. Curation, no matter what your choices for payout of the post, always pays out exclusively in Steem Power. Which might make you think that a 50/50 post actually pays out 37.5% in SBD and 62.5% in Steem Power. That's what I thought at first too, and I had a giant moment of

But it turns out it's more complicated than that, and in a way that means that while all of our math is still wrong, a lot of it isn't wrong as meaningfully as it could have been. Some big things that could have been very wrong, like vote-bot profitability calculations, actually turn out to be fine because of the next point.

So I started looking into how votes in the first half-hour actually affect the curation of a post. We've been told that early voting gives some of the voter's curation to the author, but there's not a lot of information about how that happens. And I haven't figured out the algorithm for that yet (maybe in a future post) but I do know the methodology, and it should be a key insight for your voting strategy.

Early votes increase the percentage of post payout that goes to author rewards.

And while curation is still paid out in SP, author rewards on a 50/50 post are paid out 50/50, no matter how large they are. If SBD were still pegged to USD this wouldn't be a big deal. If the peg ever manages to come back, your vote will be worth the same no matter when you cast it. But for the moment, a vote cast in the first half-hour of a post has more value than one cast later. let me repeat that in big text:

Your vote is worth more the earlier you cast it!

In the first half-hour of a post, your vote has more overall value than it does later, and the earlier the better. You won't get as much curation value, but the author of the post will gain substantially more in post payout than you will lose in curation, because their reward comes partly in inflated SBD.

This can make a huge difference. Consider our self-voting whale @snobdoucher (thanks to @meno for the name) who has a $50 vote and knows nobody else here, he just sits in a corner voting his own posts and nobody else knows he exists. All his posts end up at $50, and he's the only one who votes, so he's the only one who gets curation. You might think it shouldn't matter when the vote happens.

Well, if he votes his post instantly, all of that value goes to author rewards and he makes 25 SBD and $25 USD worth of SP, currently worth about $83 USD. But if he votes his post after half an hour, 25% of it is calculated as curation, so he gets 18.75 SBD and $31.25 USD in SP, currently worth about $73.40. That's around a 13% difference in post value, which is huge. This is an example created to maximize the difference, but even if the real effect on your posts is only four or five percent, that can be a big deal.

And that's with SBD at $2.25. If SBD ever goes way up again, it magnifies the effect.

So what does this mean to me?

On a very basic level, it means that if your goal is to support an author, you should vote earlier. It means that looking into voting automatically with services like SteemAuto has a significant amount of value; I've delegated 1500 SP to a separate account @doctorworm whose mission is to vote small authors I want to support on minute zero.

It also means that if you're manually curating and using your rewards to grow your account you should be self-voting your posts, even if it feels icky. You'll always be there at minute zero, and that self-vote will give more value to your future votes than one given to a post made more than thirty minutes ago will give to that user.

It means that you can't tell what the USD value of a post is by looking at the little number at the bottom, or the value of a vote by looking at its number in SteemWorld or Gina or wherever. I'm sure @transparencybot will eventually come along and comment on this post with the nominal value of my Minnowbooster vote, but it will be wrong. (As it points out in the comments, I was incorrect about this.) It's still possible to calculate the USD value, but you need to know the times and sizes of all of the votes already on the post.

To get all Chicago about it:

VOTE EARLY! VOTE OFTEN!