On The Importance Of Voting

TL;DR: Make sure you use your voting weight to reward and motivate authors. This is the only way platforms like Steemit can grow.

When looking at a platform like steemit or whaleshares it may occur that the most important thing is that a lot of users write high quality articles.
While I certainly agree that good content is essential for these platforms to succeed there is more to talk about.

Recently I heard that only 1 % of all steemit accounts have minnow status or above (that means have 500 or more SP). To understand why this is a bad thing we need to step back and have a look at the bigger picture.

The reason why good content creators post their articles, photos, stories etc. on a platform like steemit is certainly (to some degree at least) that they can make some money with out the need for maintaining a blog, acquiring users and use ads. But for all this good content creators there need to be users that are reading, commenting and upvoting the content. An author who spends hours writing a good article and comes back a few days later only having 7 likes and one spam comment maybe tempted to leave the platform forever.

This is why in my opinion voting is as important as writing articles. And the best part is: You also earn by voting on posts and comments! If you don't want to invest the time for voting you can delegate your spare SP to one of your favorite authors and appreciate their work in this way.