Agree that Upvotes are the oxygen of this platform. But there is a limitation with upvotes. Not everybody will be active on the platform on a daily basis. So I feel that whales should balance their SP between manual voting, rules based voting and delegation.
One suggestion I have is that every whale should delegate some part of SP to couple of followers of their who are actively engaging on their articles. It could be for a week or two weeks. This will give them a sense of what it would feel like to have higher SP and how they can use it to positively impact themselves and the community. If more whales start doing this I think we will have more meaningful engagements on Steemit and more minnows will start believing in the long term prospects of Steem and set their goals for the long term instead of getting restless in the short term.
I am planning on writing a bot which can help the authors to delegate their steam to their active followers easily through a comment. Will update once it is in a usable condition.