Well, I can tell you from my personal experience, since I did it all: declining rewards, delegating to other red fish to grow, not upvoting my own posts and donating the liquid rewards to other users (and now leaving an established blog with some autovotes). It doesn’t actually help grow the platform. At least not with our SP.

When it comes to bringing new users to Steem. Well, sometimes what you can do is discover someone who is prominent outside of Steem, who has just started it and help them out in the beginning to understand how things work.

Even so, Steem might become a birthplace of best selling creators some day. It’s just doesn’t happen in a year or two.

Sometimes the best thing you can do, is stay around and interact and contribute by interacting :)