Hello all Newcomers Community. My apologies, It's been a couple of weeks since my last acheivement 5 task post. My full-time job has been keeping me extremely busy so I havn't has as much free time to write. So here goes my attempt as the last Achievement 6 task regarding curation and community.

How Does Voting and Curation Work on Steemit?

If you find good content that you enjoy, you are going to want to upvote (little up arrow) the content, similar to liking posts on Twitter, Instagram or Facebook. This is known as curation, rewarding the content creator based on your voting power and your voting power is based on how much Steem Power (SP) you own. The main take away here is, the more SP you have, the more your votes are able to share from the reward pool. Once you reach 500 SP you will then see a slider bar appear next to your upvote and you can adjust the strength of your vote in percentages. The payout are split 50/50, so that half the reward goes to the creator and half the reward goes to the curator.

How is Curator Payout Calculated?

One thing to realize is there is a time calculation that can affect the curator reward. A curator is set receive 50% of the payout as stated above but during the first 5 minutes of a post the payout is calculated on a laddered payout as shown below:

• If a post is upvoted immediately the 50% reward stays in the reward pool.
• If a post is upvoted after 1 minute of posting, 20% goes to the curator and 80% stays in the pool.
• If a post is upvoted after 2 minutes of posting, 40% goes to the curator and 60% stays in the pool.
• If a post is upvoted after 3 minutes of posting, 60% goes to the curator and 40% stays in the pool.
• If a post is upvoted after 4 minutes of posting, 80% goest to the curator and 20% stays in the pool.
• At the 5 minute mark or after the full 50% gets rewarded to the curator.

Steem Witnesses

In order for the blockchain to function, blocks have to be created that are "chained" together and for the Steemit blockchain, these individuals are known has Witnesses, being rewarded with SP for every block they create. In order for a Witness to be considered full-time, they have to be in the Top 20 by collecting votes. My vote goes to @justyy for the steamyy.com tool that I find very useful.

What Communities Have You Joined?

• Newcomers' Community - I feel this community is a must for new Steem members. Going thru these excercises have
  helped me understand the Steemit platform in a way that I wouldn't have learned on my own.
• Art - I joined this community so that I could post some artwork that my son has created.
• Appics - I also belong to this community because I post pictures on the Appics social media phone app. Your posts on
  this app, automatically get posted to this Steemit community.
• Pets of Steemit - I personally created this community for people to be able to post content of their pets. So far we have
  52 members. Please feel free to join and post here: PetsofSteemit

To the attention of @cryptokannon @steemcurator03