Hey there @jjudd. Basically, your vote has a value based on the amount of Steem Power in your wallet. As a new user, that Steem Power is very low. So your vote does not carry much weight. but as your account grows, so does your voting power.
The process of voting does not cost you any money. It costs 2% of your voting power. Your voting power regenerates at a rate of 20% per 24 hour cycle. That means you can give 10 votes a day at "full power". Voting helps you earn curation rewards for voting on good content. Especially if you vote before big votes come in.
The key as a new user is to create good content. Also go out into the platform and look for content you enjoy and post comments about the piece, showing that you read the post, and sharing your thoughts on the subject. With any luck, the Original Poster (OP) will see your comment give it an upvote and a response. If you have a good exchange with them, they may come check out your blog and upvote those posts as well. Every upvote means more money turning up in your steem wallet after 7 days.
I'd highly recommend visiting one of the discord chat servers which are set up to help people get their bearings on Steem. The biggest is the Minnow Support Network. You can find them here: https://discord.gg/MpVmSg
I hope this explanation helps a little bit. Gonna throw you a $1.00 upvote too for some more pennies to go into your wallet.
Fantastic. Thanks for the reply! And for the $1!!
My understanding was people would have to either buy and/or earn STEEM in order to vote. That makes sense.
So, I just upvoted your reply above and it gave you (a whopping) 0.04. You're saying it doesn't come out of my account balance, so where did it come from?
There is a daily reward pool of created steem. The more Steem Power you have, the more of that reward pool is allocated to you to give out.
Think of it like mining bitcoin. Miners use their processing power to mine blocks of bitcoin. The GPU processing power is the Proof of Work. In the case of Steemit, we have Witnesses who are running servers that process the blocks for us, and by creating content that gets rewarded by upvotes, the token is distributed, like a mining pool. So content creation is the proof of work for the Steem Blockchain.
I'm sure someone can explain it much better than I can, but that's what I can offer you. Your upvote is worth $0.04 because it looks like you bought some Steem and imported it in. Most people start with just 27 Steem Power loaned to them from the platform and slowly earn their way up. By having over 300 Steem Power you are actually probably in the top 20,000 or so out of 400,000 accounts. hehehe
Power user! ;-)
Livin' large baby!
Awesome. Appreciate all the info!