I'm much like you. Unless I cash out and convert to fiat which I can use to pay the bills I don't really think about the value of the SBDs. And I certainly don't have any problem giving out upvotes when I like something. It's not like the money comes out of my own wallet (well I suppose it does ultimately if I'm also posting, but I'm not going down that rabbit hole.) In some ways Steemit resembles a game, with SBDs being the points, and SP granting power-ups that make the gaming experience more fun.
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Exactly! It's a gamification of rewards for content creation. And that's exactly how I explain Steemit to people: "You write stuff and get votes from other people on the platform, and those points turn into money if you want them to."
That's what I (naively) believed when I joined. And when it works, because of good people creating good content, it works beautifully. However, the gamification rules are weak, and spam authors can easily garner a lot of steem power. Which is a serious problem; even much older systems (such as email / blogs) requried spammers to spend some cost / effort.
Now, one might say that it doesn't matter.. we could just ignore the spam and keep steeming for content and treat rewards just as a side-effect. But then, why would one use STEEM at all? One could simply use an open-source social network such as mastodon along with a system of direct rewards instead of indirect rewards.
All that said, I am still hanging in here for a few more months, hopeful that a solution to spam is found soon.