# **WELCOME TO RELEVANT: A MODERATELY COMPLETE GUIDE**
Welcome!
This is a quick-start guide to the Relevant Community. It is divided into a couple of sections in order to help give you a moderately detailed overview of the community in general and most of the key aspects of it that can sometimes be challenging to new members.
**INDEX**
What is Relevant
How Does It Work? (Basic Overview)
Quick Start
More Detailed Overview
Staking Mechanics
In-depth Staking Mechanics
Troubleshooting
**WHAT IS RELEVANT?**
Relevant is a news-sharing and discussion platform curated by humans, not algorithms. Relevant is a new kind of value-based social network built on QUALITY, not clicks. Instead of filtering information using opaque, popularity-based algorithms, Relevant has a Reputation System (REP) that encourages users to rank content according to its value.
Relevant is a user-owned network. It has a built-in prediction market that distributes coins as curation rewards. These coins can be traded for Ethereum-based tokens (REL) that represent ownership in the Relevant ecosystem. This means that users are the owners of the platform — not its product.
**HOW DOES IT WORK?**
The Relevant REP system puts curation power in the hands of trusted community members and experts instead of passive consumers. Anyone can contribute to the conversation, but the information that is upvoted by community members with high REP scores will appear more prominently in the Relevant feed.
Each Relevant Community is a topic-specific feed of curated content and discussions. Relevant Communities are similar to subreddits, only instead of ranking posts by number of upvotes, Relevant ranks content according to the REP of the users who upvoted those posts. That’s why on Relevant, one upvote from a reputable user is worth more than a million upvotes from bot accounts.
**QUICK START.**
If you want to get REL Coins and benefit from the Relevant community, here is a very quick guide.
DO:
DO Read informative writing
DO Upvote and bet/stake on RELEVANT content
DO Downvote ALL irrelevant spam
DO NOT:
DO NOT Post in the wrong community
DO NOT Post irrelevant content
DO NOT Post short, superficial, responses
DO NOT Post airdrops, scams, etc
DO NOT Troll for upvotes
If you get stuck, basic questions are best addressed in the SUPPORT community, by clicking HELP on the app or desktop, checking out the blogs, or reading previous answers by high REP members in the Support community.
Introductions or very basic questions not in the Support community are probably going to get aggressively downvoted as they are of less relevance.
**MORE DETAILED OVERVIEW**
To get started, you need to acquire REL Coins/Tokens. Currently, that most likely means buying them off of Uniswap or an exchange. Once you have them in a Metamask wallet that is connected to your account, you can begin staking on content. (Do note that it may take up to 3 days for the REL to fully “power up” in the system.)
On the Relevant platform, you can earn REL Coins form upvoting and betting on RELEVANT content (see it’s right in the name). If you think an article or comment is genuinely valuable, upvote it and bet/stake on it. Stakes are held for 3 days after you vote and then returned to you. If you bet correctly you will be awarded additional REL Coins proportional to your bet, taking into account how early you stake, and how other content is up or down voted throughout all of the communities.
Given this, it is in your interest to ONLY bet on genuinely relevant content and to downvote all genuinely irrelevant content (downvoting costs you nothing). There is no direct REL Coin benefit to posting comments and irrelevant comments are a nuisance. This is NOT a like-for-like community typical of social media platforms, so skip all of the pointless “Awesome,” “Nice,” “Interesting,” “Wow,” “Good,” “Like,” and “Upvote” replies.
You can post, but do not post anything unless it is genuinely going to add real value to the dialogue. Thoughtful, relevant, comments can add to your REP. While your REP will not directly give you REL Coins, it will serve as a marker of your general expertise within a particular community. Your REP will also give you more power to downvote spam. REP varies by community, proportional to the relevance of your contributions in a given community.
**STAKING MECHANICS**
Relevant features as sophisticated 2-metric system to help reduce the influence of bad actors and irrelevant posts, while also rewarding valuable, relevant, contributions. Because of this, the number of raw votes on a post or piece of content is NOT the same as the Reputation rating for that post. The Reputation score ranges from -100 to 100. Hover over the vote count on an actual desktop to see the Reputation score of a post. In theory, a post could have 1,000 0 REP members up vote it and it still be very low scoring or only 4 or 5 99 REP members up vote it and be very high scoring. All votes are not equal. This is by design.
In addition to the matter of votes, timing, amount bet, and bet location all matter. Earlier bets, larger bets, larger proportions of bets, and communities with more bets matter. Even beyond all of that, if a post is not above the 50th percentile on relevance score (no matter how many up votes or how much staked on it), the payout will ALWAYS be 0.
While all of this can sometimes seem like a lot, it is really just the mechanics behind supporting a quality, value-based, community. You can more or less forget about the particulars and just focus on sharing or staking on the best content available. The rest will generally sort itself out.
**IN-DEPTH STAKING MECHANICS**
The amount of shares you get for each bet is determined by this formula:
yourShares = 1/2 * (currentBets + yourBet) ^2 - currentShares
So to get the 1st share you would need to stake .5 tokens. 2nd share would be more 'expensive' and require 1.5, 3rd share would require 2.5, and so on.
The payout is split among all shareholders of the post based on how many shares they hold.
Each additional person to stake will both dilute the rewards pool and add to it, though the later they are in staking the more ‘expensive’ a share, so the more they will have to pay for a comparable stake. They may also make the pool much more likely to pay out depending on their REP.
Choose wisely how you deploy your bets as you will need to bet on good, relevant, content in order for the payout to happen, but by the time you can be fairly certain of a payout, the potential reward will be really small for the same amount staked or considerably more expensive to achieve the same payout as others who staked before you.
**TROUBLESHOOTING**
Why are you getting a small REL return?
1. You are not staking much REL (more staked pays more).
2. You are not staking early enough (the first to stake gets dramatically more of a return than later bets).
3. You are betting on low relevance posts (a post MUST be in top 50% of relevance in order to pay out).
4. You are betting on posts where a lot of REL has been bet (lower proportions of shares pay lower).
5. You are up voting posts after 3 days (after the staking period closes there is no payout on up votes).
6. You are upvoting without staking (unless you stake/bet your REL you will not get a return).
7. You have no REL to stake (you need to have REL in your account).
8. You are staking in a low-bet community (the community in which you stake matters).
9. You are not down voting obvious spam (the system factors in total up and down votes in several metrics).
10. You are posting irrelevant posts which will decrease your REP and decrease your ability to sway outcomes.
11. There are more active members staking in a given period of time (payout factors in relative bet activity).
12. Doing something else (attempts to manipulate the system or generally other unhelpful things).