Of course you can treat your upvotes as "likes". This is completely up to you. They're your votes. The question to ask yourself is what you want to accomplish on Steemit. If you want to read good content and spread "likes", good for you. I have no issue with that.
If you are wanting to help reward people for their effort on good posts, then your spreading of "likes" isn't helping them. It just makes you feel good about yourself. People on Steemit usually want to get some reward for their effort and .001 to .004 isn't going to do it. If you want to truly help them, then conserve your voting power and build your account so your votes are actually worth something.
Regarding curation trails. They sound nice. My posts get hit with a few trails each day. To be honest, 90% of the votes on trail appear as .000 on my Ginabot notification. I love that I got 35 votes in 10 seconds, but the actual value isn't significant usually after the 1st 3 to 5 people in the trail. Few of the people in the trail read my post and even fewer comment on it. Therefore, zero engagement, zero relationship building, zero long term benefits for either of us. Who benefits? Those first 5 people in the trail that improved their curation rewards off the following 30 to 70. I will do trails when they place my vote in the #2 position (won't happen, so I won't be doing trails).
Sorry for the two replies. I sandwiched a meeting in between these, but you're important and I wanted to respond.
No worries on the separate replies, I appreciate you taking the time to answer. I read everything I could about Steemit when I got here a little over a month ago then realized if I tried to figure it all out I'd never get anything done. I jumped in and am still trying to decipher the best way to go about everything so I am definitely interested.
Holy crap really?!?!?! I set it to 100% SP last week because I thought that would help me build my account faster so I could offer more with my upvotes. Literally just stopped writing this to go switch it back. I honestly thought that would be the best way to do it right now since I can't afford to throw money into it. At any rate, it's now changed back - thank you!
I do, which is why I set it to full powerup.; I thought that would help me do that faster because my SP would be more. I'm finally to where I am giving .01 on my first 2-3 votes starting at 100% now. Which of course is still nothing, but it's something more than 0 (even though it is actually zero as I see you have already touched on in another post!)
I noticed this! I received a Curie vote on a post and it was really cool watching them all come in...then I looked at them.
Ok, I started this reply quite some time ago and am back to finish after reading a couple of your other posts. I guess my thinking was that if I held onto my votes at this point, they would still be zero anyway. I just checked and my Voting CSI is ( 0.00 % self, 45 upvotes, 29 accounts, last 7d ), so I think I'm ok since I'm not draining it regularly.
You've given me a lot to think about and I've already put some of it into action. Now, I'm switching tabs because you're open in another one and this is already a book. 😆
Seriously though - thank you!!
It is my pleasure. Thanks for the great feedback and for working so hard at making your account better. Keep me updated on your progress and issues that come up. All the best.