Hi there, thank you for sharing this info with us all. Im very new here and just a little over a week old. I just seen that we can upvote our own blogs 😮 i had no clue, i didnt understand why we would even want to upvote our selves . But then someone explained that if we have the extra power and no time building it up that it doesnt hurt to use it.  ?? Idk im still trying to wrap my mind around this whole site . Reading and learning seams to be key here and of course lots of time to spend.. 
So reading and trying to understand your .01 cents to .19 cents doesnt payout ? But .02 cents will? 
And im a bit lost on if you have higher value your power percentage goes lower? Like ok my 20% gives i believe  .2 cents but your saying that if the value of the account goes higher then you have to give 80% to get .2 cents on a vote? Im so lost or maybe i got it wrong lol

@WWF

I have seen that post by Tim, and a few others talking about the dust level. I still have a question about it, because I get a lot of this type payout `Claim rewards: 0.018 SBD and 0.008 STEEM POWER`, as you can see the sbd did not pass over the dust threshold. Granted I have not seen one that was only SBD, but a lot in that award range for me. I vote mostly on smaller/new user accounts and comments.

Since seeing and learning about the dust threshold, I have done like you and if I see a poster trying to reward a comment, I try to lend a hand with a two sent upvote so that the posters reward is not "dusted".  The same if I see a commenter try to reward another comment that they found relevant to the discussion. I hope this will bring more eyes on the vote visibility, and I appreciate your willingness to assist the new users also. I know you have assisted myself in the past when I was first joining and learning steemit.

>I have a feeling that because many people don't know about the dust threshold, they are thinking that their self-voted spam is earning something.

... and there are those that thought that their lonely $0.01 vote is going to the recipient :-)

After raging on that post we met on, I started an initiative that would do much more for my community than my upvote could do. A discord group and a community upvote bot that's built to upvote the new and promising members of the community.

I believe that we will get enough SP delegated to support ~20 newcomers with a modest daily upvote.

Well, it is certainly interesting to find out a bit more about upvoting. Thanks for the information. This will surely make me a wiser upvoter.

You have been upvoted by @black-man because I found your content useful. I run the Yensesa.com project @yensesa , which is the first Ghanaian Steem/SBD to fiat exchange in Ghana using mobile money. We also use our steem delegations to support and promote quality post of new members. 

== You can delegate to help us promote Steem and support new members ==

# REPLACE username with your username (no @ symbol)

### 50 SP = 103470.397100
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=username&delegatee=yensesa&vesting_shares=103470.397100%20VESTS

### 100 SP = 206940.794200
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=username&delegatee=yensesa&vesting_shares=206940.794200%20VESTS

### 250 SP = 517351.985500
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=username&delegatee=yensesa&vesting_shares=517351.985500%20VESTS

### 500 SP = 1034703.971000
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=username&delegatee=yensesa&vesting_shares=1034703.971000%20VESTS

### 1000 SP = 2069407.942000
https://v2.steemconnect.com/sign/delegateVestingShares?delegator=username&delegatee=yensesa&vesting_shares=2069407.942000%20VESTS

I had a bit of a chuckle at the terminology, "dust amounts". For me posting in the comments is a fun activity. I saw a comment today asking for help because they where new, almost pleading for an upvote. Their reputation number was very low, I wondered if they knew what that little number was and that it was likely someone was down voting them. Poor fella I thought. I do appreciate your post, it does make me want to provide better comments. I benefit by getting the word jam out of my fingertips!

Thanks so much I wasnt aware of this - and in sure like 90% of steemians arent either.

People should be educated that upvoting yout own comments is poor form -and at the lower level its a complete waste of an upvote that could have gone towards an article you liked.

I dont think that increasing the threshhold will do much apart from making people mad.

Maybe once people have been flagged as spammers then their threshold should increase - once they have been a proven spammer then we should be harsh.

On the flipside i think alot of spammers dont actually know their comments come across like spam so maybe we need to be lenient and educate people

Hi Taraz. Didn't know this and not that my vote holds any value yet will always do a 100 percent. Only problem is you start dropping in value and power rather quickly. Will keep an eye out for the dust votes and add my vote where I can. What happens to all those non paid out votes? Must add up to quite a bit over a period of time.

I didn't know that.. Basically i didn't know much about steemit yet, im still learning and this one is really helpful. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!

I did learn about the Dust Thesshold a week ago. Devoted 2 posts about it. One in which I did explain the thingy and the second one in which I did gave tips how to surpass it.
Helping other with an upvote, to push a value above the limit was one of them. But also #steembasicincome or just writing the post with busy.org and using the tag busy can really help!
Also I did change my voting behavior, increasing the upvotesof comments!
If do upvote posts, but aren’t so generous anymore with upvoting replies of the author because I did already upvtethe post!
And to make it clear, I wont flag you if you drop by at my blog and give a post an upvote 😁

This is fucking stupid.

1 cent spammers are not the major problem on steem. This doesn't effect the assholes in trending earning $1000 per post on absolute shit. This affects tiny accounts making a few cents.

Yeah, spammers can technically make a million posts earning 1 cent on each...but that's what bandwidth was supposed to deal with, if it actually worked. Remember that fiasco? Spammers still spamming, but legit users couldn't post.

I'm pretty sure I made less than 2 cents on my first few posts. Fuck these idiots. "Let's solve a problem by making a bigger problem!"

Raising the threshold would be even worse. I have made less than $1 on some posts I've poured my heart and soul into. 

How can they even think this is a bigger issue than accounts getting thousands of dollars for absolute shit posts, and becoming whales, and then being the ones that determine who is rewarded in the future?

I applaud your idea to help smaller accounts with good posts/comments to reach the $0.02 threshold. I think I'll follow suit, emphasize it more, mainly because most of what I see from folks are on the lower accounts' posts.

It really is sad to see even those small amounts evaporate into nothing all for the sake of the computational load on the blockchain. Makes me wonder what that means when the flood gates are opened with Velocity. If it is an issue of computation, wouldn't more people on the blockchain cause event a greater problem?

What I'm not sure about, though, is where does the dust go? It may have been in Tim Cliff's post, but I don't remember seeing it. If it gets burned or returned to the reward pool, I guess that's okay. Otherwise, it would be nice to know where it does go.

Someone left a comment on another blog post saying the dust lined the pockets of Steem Inc. It sounded a little facetious, but it did make me wonder.

I noticed this 'dust threshold' thing but rarely paid attention to it.

I agree (yea, I used that) with everything, little things that seem negligible actually matter to us, the minnows.

I like 'guys' that make it a 'duty' to add value to the blockchain, by providing info and support to the minnows. And the least a minnow can do is to add quality contents to the blockchain, rewards eventually come with that. 

It is also nice to know my one cent can determine someone that is deserving get paid.

Waow thanks @tarazkp for letting us understand the concept of the dust amount, if i get you right, you said 0.001 -  0.019 has no payouts?, i guess i have not come across these before

Well that took the winds right out of my sails. I (being a red fish) was pretty excited to see that my account value went over hundred dollars this weekend. 
I also have to admit that I started using steemplus so that I can divide my voting power (steemplus gives you voting power  slider option even if you are a minnow or a red fish). The darnedest thing is that even if I upvote with 100% power I still generate 'dust' amounts for my upvote.

I came across this post just in time.  I was pretty excited to finally have 0.01 to spread around. Now I won't waste it on the few comments I get on my posts. It will be put to much better use to visit those people and vote where it will count more.  Us little guys really do have to use each penny wisely. I am glad to find so many people sharing knowledge.  It can be hard as a newbie to come up with a strategy, especially when not knowing all the facts. 
BTW comment section here is pure gold. I learned all kinds of interesting bits. Also found some new people to check out :)

When I first started (last July), I don’t remember much talk about NOT self-voting. It felt strange to upvote myself, but I remember reading comments to the opposite effect - i.e. “pay to play,” “why should I upvote you if you don’t upvote yourself?”

I took a break from Steemit when we got the call about our twin girls, and jumped back on late Jan. Now, it seems there’s a reversal. I’ve been self-voting (posts, not comments) mainly because (until recently) my followers are small voters, so I know I’m making the pool bigger for them.

Most of them don’t post regularly, but I will read and upvote if they do and also upvote their comments.

I haven’t had much time to think about this, but it’s been coming up a lot. Now I’m thinking I could either stop self-voting posts or I could do a weekly giveaway of the earnings from self-voting so that all followers can still benefit from my vote being in the pool. What do you think?

Every time I think of a topic to write about regarding the mechanics of Steem, you one up my unpenned thoughts in excellent and clear posts.

Please, get out of my head! :p

I was really surprised to learn that on Tim's post too. Thankfully I generally give people at least .02 when I upvote their comments on my posts already, but it has highlighted for me how important it is to be mindful of it always.

Also, you're right that in responding to an author on their own post when he/she replies to me I will give an upvote if I don't think the conversation needs to continue, but want to express appreciation for their reply. I think it's good you've declined to receive those upvotes, and think that should become an unofficial norm. That way we can all direct more of our upvotes to quality comments that maybe have an upvote on them from an author who can't give .02 with a single vote, even at 100% allocation.

I want to note that I don't agree with you about not upvoting people who have upvoted themselves. This just shows all the more why people should NOT be penalized for upvoting themselves, if that's what it takes to turn a .01 upvote into a .02 upvote! 

And I also know that I sometimes will upvote one of my comments just because I know that post author doesn't read all his comments, only the ones at the top of the page! 

I also think it is fine apart from this really, so long as the person's overall upvote ratios are no more than 50% going to themselves across their activity on the platform. I think it's most fair to simply upvote a comment you think is good, but I know you and I also disagree about downvoting to express the assessment of an overvalued payout, so I suspect this variance of opinion stems from that one.

Where I draw the line is with paying bots to upvote one's own comments. I gave this a try for a couple weeks that I just didn't have time to post much and was only commenting on the posts of others, but it just didn't feel right to me. Now when I come across a comment where I can see they used an upvote bot I'm like, "really?" LOL

Te comento dos cositas: la primera es que me pareció aparte de interesante muy completa tu información, hay cosas de la plataforma que aun muchos de los que estamos aquí no conocemos, en mi caso lo digo por mi y la segunda es que te felicito porque la verdad es interesante aprender de los que ya tienen mas conocimientos como tu por ejemplo te envio saludos y te invito a seguir compartiendo información como estas completas y con mucha sabiduría saludos.


I commented two things: the first is that I found it very interesting apart your information, there are things on the platform that even many of us here do not know, in my case I say it for me and the second is that I congratulate you because the truth is interesting to learn from those who already have more knowledge as you for example I send greetings and I invite you to continue sharing information as you are complete and very wisely greetings

Hi there Tarazkp ~ been a while as have been travelling and reordering our lives :)

This is an intriguing post and makes me wonder if you ever sleep what with your consistent posting of quality and backroom knowledge!

I will need to read it several times to really grasp the implications of your suggested voting strategy which seems to be of value.

Offline for about 5 weeks, except for phone access, I never got the chance to truly thankyou for the delegated SP you generously afforded me. It certainly made a difference and it was unfortunate that several of the weeks coincided with our move. That said I made sure to make great use of it prior to our getting our wiggle on!

Also thanks for the upvotes.

I hope you and yours are well and send you a virtual hug and pint.

xox