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The followers don't matter, 1 vote made me INSTANT profit. Nobody voted after it happened.

Ohh gotcha. Maybe I just had bad luck on the rolls.

Doubt it, my 8% roll still made $6 with $2 investment. I don't know, maybe STEEM and/or SBD lost a lot of value in the 7 weeks after you did it? Maybe the voting power of randowhale was (far) under 10%? Could be number of things.

My account is only 6 days old...so it can't be that! The 4% roll got me 60 cents, 18% and roll got me 2.03 (also included other upvotes), and 34% got me about $4 (but was at below $2 at time of randowhale vote). Does age of account play into it?

I don't know why these numbers are so random. At least your 34% roll gave you a direct profit...

You're expected to roll 25% on average i believe so on average you will profit.

The main things that influence it is changes in STEEM/SBD prize on the market and currently voting power of the randomwhale account (voting power can be seen on http://www.steemd.com/@randowhale in the 17th row of the table on the left).

Yeah, with the $1.50 SBD price, I lost on all 3. Even the 34% roll didn't get me $4...it got me somewhere around $2....the other $2 came from future upvotes from other steemians.

I don't know, it might be because of the exponential rewards that are still in place. Tomorrow it will be linear so people with millions of dollars don't have 1000s of times more influence than they should.