Great post. I'm quite happy to have never (so far) powered down in the year+ I've been here. I'm fortunate enough to not need that money for anything else.
I'm glad you mentioned #6 as it is a controversial one, but it may also reveal something I've been cautiously curious about. What if those with higher steem power often have better comments simply due to their nature/nurture mix which enabled them to accumulate wealth? I want to be very careful here not to say something as black and white as "rich people are better communicators" or something like that, but I do wonder if there's some form of valid correlation which can be teased out. Sometimes I'll find a new account with a relatively low SP who catches my attention and over time they end up becoming a higher powered account because, one might think, they are the type of people who do things rich people are willing to do (take risks, be generous, provide value to others, etc).
There are always exceptions to every rule of thumb.
In general, having steem power is rarely a liability if ever.
A person with poor mannerisms or ethics is that way whether they have steem power or not.
A person with good mannerisms and ethics can benefit even more, by having steem power as a bonus.
So in this case, it's not the person... but the steem power, that seems to be the bonus in the case of good people that want to be noticed more...
I have only been active for a few weeks and bought some STEEM to power up. I've seen both types of accounts as you suggested. Some accounts have a lot of SP and barely any content or engagement, and some accounts have low SP and lots of engagement. It is quality engagement too!
Hopefully people will not hold it against me that I'm powering up by buying Steem Power. I want to use Steemit as one of many investments, and I always invest for the long haul. My hope is to get to 5K SP as quickly as possible, and I do not plan to do that simply through posting. Is that bad?
I have never seen someone get seen negatively for buying SP.
It's the opposite.
People buy STEEM and power up, are very well thought of...
The only time they aren't is if they do that (buy and power up) and then use that power to abuse users on the system by downvoting non-stop or other things.
If you power up and behave... everyone loves you.
Awesome, thanks! Yes, I love Steemit and fully support the mission behind it. I'm bringing as many new people as I can over to the platform too from places like Google+ and FascistBook.
That's another thing that @timcliff was stressing on a recent @steemittalk podcast:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@steemittalk/stp-episode-043-07-08-2017-w-special-guest-timcliff
He basically said, if you bake a bigger pie, everyone gets a larger piece.
Most new users to steemit, makes steemit a bigger reward pie for everyone.
So yes, please bring more new users here. We need them. Steemit is designed to scale large.
Oh yeah, my dream come true would be for the censoring content filtering "do no evil" Google+ and jail house FascistBook to go the way of Myspace. Steemit is the better alternative to walk away from the two disasters those places have become.
No! I don't think that's bad at all. I'm surprised you would even think that. Investors are the only reason STEEM has any value at all. When I started here, I invested in STEEM a bit also. I think anyone who is serious about the platform should so they can help determine where new STEEM gets allocated via their votes. The notion that some Steem Power is better than others based on how it was earned is silly to me. It's fungible value. All that matters is what you do with it.
...aka the reason for this post. We need to focus on it a bit more so people don't think that, ever. I was shocked too when I saw that innocent question.
I cannot remember the source of the post, but they were talking about how great it was that @papa-pepper had supposedly never bought into his account and built it completely based off engagement and work here. The implication was that the author of the post wanted more people like that user and less people who simply bought SP.
Shrug. I disagree, and it's unimportant to me.
I've adjusted my reply to @everittdmickey on this very blog. That must have been where you read it.
It now states:
Thanks! Yes, I'm still new here, so I don't want to step on any toes or do things that upset people. I really appreciate the advice from you long time veterans. A lot of SP is in my future.
I love the security aspects of storing SP too. People can put their crypto profits in SP to protect them. That's a lot safer than having them on an exchange that can be hacked.
Knowing my luck too, I'll lose a hardware wallet. haha
P.S. It was not your post that I saw that about papa. It was an entirely different thread. They were against SP being bought, and the discussion was about SP, not reputation. If I find it, I will let you know. :)