Why do SteemWorld and SteemNow show different values for my upvote?

I was asked this within a chatroom and it struck me as a good add-on to my previous post, How to think about your upvotes after HF21 - a non-technical guide.

I also thought that this would be instructive in seeing how there are two ways to think about the value of your upvotes: either starting at the top and dropping, or starting at the bottom and rising.

SteemWorld and SteemNow have taken these two contrasting approaches. This has caused some confusion as they show very different values - actually one is just half of the other - so here is a quick guide as to why they appear different but are actually the same.

Let's take a numerical example to make life easier. Suppose you have a voting SP of 5,000 STEEM.

If you input 5,000 SP into SteemNow's upvote calculator, leaving other parameters at 100%, you will see a figure of $0.0402.

If you use SteemWorld's very handy "simulated SP" function and input 5,000 SP, then make sure you scale up the voting power and weight to 100%, then you will get about 0.0786.

Your figures may be different when you try this as global Steem blockchain parameters will have changed slightly, but they should be approximately the same as I just got.

Now, why does SteemNow show $0.0402 but SteemWorld gives $0.0786?

One is almost double the other. The key to this can be found in the respective announcements by the two devs of the two resources.

In this article, @penguinpablo explains that SteemNow "shows the vote value as if you were the only one upvoting a post. Your vote value is not static anymore in HF21, but is higher if more people vote on a post before or after you." (My italics.)

For low upvotes, and hence low rshares, the new reward curve approximates the "reward value" at just 50% of the "vote value". For a deeper explanation of the difference between these two "values", please read this earlier post.

This 50% value slowly rises depending on the total rshares values of upvotes on a post. For very popular posts, this will converge towards the familiar linear relationship where the total value of the rewards are the simple sum of all the individual upvotes.

And this is what SteemWorld does - almost! If you read this latest post from @steemchiller, you will find, "Since SteemWorld can't know which post we will vote on, it currently shows the estimated value for a vote on a post that already got 20 STEEM." (Again, my italics.) So this is why the SteemWorld value is not quite double SteemNow's value, as 20 STEEM is not quite enough to reach linearity. (To justify this will take us down the mathematical route I wish to avoid for this post!)

So what does the humble Steemian make of all this?

You could just avoid all mental anguish and just vote on whatever you want and let the curation rewards come in as they may.

However, one important consequence of all this is that higher upvotes will be worth more at reward payout time. This means that if you are upvoting friends or curating manually then fewer but larger upvotes will have more impact on each poster.

For example, if you give someone a 10% upvote every day, you may wish to consider giving them 70% on just one post per week.

The answer to the ultimate question, "What is my upvote worth?" is a resounding... depends!

If you regularly use SteemWorld, then keep in mind that your upvote, at the time of delivery, will be worth a bit more than half of what you see on that platform.

If you use SteemNow, then your upvote will be shown approximately correctly, although will probably end up higher.

Both show your upvote as somewhere between 50% and 100% of what you expect - they just start at opposite ends of the spectrum.

Hope that helps.

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