From a Red Fish point of view:
I've noticed several negative trends since landing here 2 weeks ago. And noticed a lot which I do not understand.
For me upvoting self originally made a lot of sense, since I set a goal to earn here so I can get a new desktop PC to create better quality content (gifs, memes, videos, etc.) that my current laptop just can't produce well. Yet as the experience continued I realized self voting, for us little fish, is really shooting ourselves and the community in the foot.
Not understanding what a Power Up (100%) post is, I am shying away from upvoting them until I have a better understanding of it. For all I know it's more of a benefit for us Red Fish, I just don't know enough about it and am already eyeballs deep in umpteen other research projects (and content creation).
And I think a lot of newcomers like me believe chasing Whales, upvoting only high dollar content while contributing little to no original content, all for the sake of profit over people, will lead them to riches beyond their wildest dreams.
I can speculate all day, yet it boils down to (in relation to your question), in my belief, these few things:
- Misunderstanding the system, over-posting and over-upvoting quickly diminishes the value of both our posts and voting power. And not knowing the benefit or shortcoming differences between Power Up Posts & 50/50 posts & Payout Refusal posts (for example, @ned had a $2,500 post well worth an upvote yet it was set to Payout Refusal... not knowing if that means upvoting would weaken my voting power while gaining nothing in return, I did not give it the upvote).
- Greed, too many here who only care to cash out every chance they get - wanting it all by giving away nothing.
- Red Fish not sticking together.... I see so many of us resteeming content of Whales and Bots while seemingly ignoring our fellow Red Fish/Minnows. I personally look at a few of my followers (by looking at their feed, not waiting for me to spot them in mine) on a daily basis and do what I can to support them before paying any attention to the bigger fish in my feed.
Excellent post. Wish I could do more for it than just comment. Yet my noobie "upvote everything like crazy... oops, now I have no voting power" needs a serious recharge.