How to Understand Voting on Cent

*This will be the first in a series of how-to guides introducing and explaining some of the foundational features and functions of beta.cent.co*

The Basics of Voting

Voting on Cent is a deceptively simple, but incredibly powerful function that every registered Cent user (a.k.a. Centian) has the right to engage in. It is also the only way - currently - to ensure that quality responses make it to the top and receive their just compensation and that poor responses are pushed out of sight to the bottom.

After you log in to Cent and click on any bounty, you will see a cascading stream of responses. For bounties that have been live for a while, responses will appear in order of up votes received - so responses at the top have received the most up votes. Responses that haven't received votes will appear in descending chronological order with the most recent responses appearing last, but above responses that have received down-votes.

In the top-right corner of every response you will see two light gray triangles: the right-side up triangle on the left is the up-vote button, and the inverted triangle on the right is the down-vote button. You can give a maximum of three (3) up-votes and three (3) down-votes to *each* response. [Refer to the above picture of my beautiful wife @monica up-voting @nickb +3 times using Cipher Browser]

Voting is the primary factor that determines 1) placement of responses (i.e. the more votes your response receives the closer to the top it will appear) and 2) how much of the bounty each response receives.

The Cent team is currently in the process of iterating an innovative "Centurion" algorithm. In it's first iteration this algorithm used the reputation of responders to pump up the proportion of the bounty it could receive.

Currently the algorithm has incorporated quadratic scoring and has limited payouts to the top ten responses. So a payout to any given response in the top ten is based on the square of the number of votes it receives and is proportional to the percentage of the total sum of the square number of votes of each top ten response.

For you and any other Centian who contributes their time and consideration up-voting and down-voting responses, 10% of each bounty will be distributed based on a user's most recent 30 day "reputation."

So each vote you cast on an answer (up or down) results in you increasing your proportion of the 10% bounty reserved for users who vote on responses in that specific bounty. Voting +1 or +3 makes no difference. The degree to which your proportion increases is based off of your reputation.

Reputation is a weighted sum of your performance over the past 30 days. Earnings that are more recent are weighted heavier than older earnings. And earnings from more than 30 days ago do not count at all. A high reputation user earns more per vote compared to a low reputation user. The leaderboard on Cent shows the top users sorted by reputation.

Well, that covers the basics of voting. Tomorrow I will share my own personal voting calculus.