I'm new too and have a lot of questions about the voting process myself. I think I might be able to help a little and hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong.
Posts on steemit generate two types of rewards: author rewards and curation rewards. The author rewards go to the person who created the original post. The curation rewards go to the people who upvote the post. The dollar amount that you see is the amount of SBD (Steem Dollars) that the post has generated thus far.
At the end of 7 days, the rewards that the post has generated are split between the author and the curators. The author can also choose to decline the payout.
You will receive two types of payouts for posts. One is in SBD (cryptocurrency, currently 1 SBD is worth approximately $8 USD) and the other is in Steem Power (SP, your influence on steemit). You can get more voting influence by increasing your SP. SBD can be used to buy more SP in a process called "powering up." Similarly, you can "power down" your SP and change your SP back into SBD. However, the powering down process is gradual over the course of many weeks, so you can't convert SP back to SBD instantly.
If you go to https://steemd.com/@knowledge4u you can see your voting power and other details. More voting power increases the amount of rewards that the post generates when you upvote it.
How the rewards are distributed are a little more complicated. Part of it depends on your voting power. When you vote on a post, it attaches a value to your vote in "rshares." When the post pays out, it splits the rewards in a weighted fashion so people whose votes generate more rshares receive a bigger portion of the rewards than those whose votes generate fewer rshares.
If you go here: https://steemd.com/upvote/@knowledge4u/what-are-upvotes-dollars-on-steemit-what-is-its-worth you can see the breakdown for this post. If you click on "vote details" at the bottom, it breaks down the upvotes for you. Since I'm new, you can see that my upvote only generated a measly 280,660,978 rshares.
voter weight wgt% rshares pct time
knowledge4u 0 B 0.00% 458,070,700 100% 2017-12-28T20:55:12
jaalahrdupont 0.00000068 B 1.13% 702,099,476 100% 2017-12-28T20:56:54
johnakharia 0 B 0.00% 213,777,026 100% 2017-12-28T22:30:09
majgibbons 0.0000077 B 12.84% 504,185,200 100% 2017-12-28T22:41:00
larryphang 0.000016 B 26.71% 1,840,849,104 1% 2017-12-29T02:53:42
sc0ut 0.00000214 B 3.57% 280,660,978 100% 2017-12-29T03:50:33
When you make a post, you can choose how much you want in SBD versus SP. The default is 50%/50%, which means that 50% of your rewards will be in SP and 50% in SBD. If you change this to 100%, all the rewards will go towards powering up your account.
I hope this is a little helpful, and hopefully others will chime in, too.
I am very thankful for this detailed Answer. Because I am new here, so almost 70% of it I understood completely but still some points are so complex that it will take time to understand.
Because you already did a lot of effort to explain me almost every point, So I was thinking not to bother you more, So I was asking question in Chat as well.
As I get to know the lump sum amount which we see on every ones post is SBD. But when I read following artile..... This guy is writing in picture number 3 and at point 4 that it is USD. Thats why I was confused what is that.................. Actually this (following Link) is the reason I made this blog.
https://steemit.com/steem-help/@steempowerwhale/how-to-upvote-make-money-and-avoid-costly-mistakes-quick-and-easy-help-for-noobs
One more question still I have in my mind about boosters.
when people spend (let me assume 5SBD), depending on the boosting power at that time, they get upvote and their total dollars become like double , it appears nearly 10$.
what is that then? If it is 10SBD, then it means they can double their money by simply by (any) booster upvote. is that right and legal?
I haven't tried to purchase any boosters yet, but I would be cautious. I saw this post the other day about how one of the biggest booster services turns out to be lining their own pockets with the majority of the money you give them: https://steemit.com/whales/@scarlet7/are-you-paying-randowhale-do-you-know-how-he-is-using-your-money-not-to-upvote-you-with-his-massive-steempower-read-here
The post was downvoted by the owners of the service (with an extremely powerful account) to the point where it was effectively censored. but you can still view it if you click "show." In any case, I wouldn't use that service. I looked into the @minnowbooster service, but it seems like I don't have enough influence on the platform yet to participate.
I recommend using some of the smaller free services like @larryphang (who will resteem your post) rather than paying for a service where it's ambiguous how much of a return on investment you will receive.
Very well explained!!
In this post I show an infographic explaining all the process. And here you have the details :)