Want steemit to thrive as a community? Support the minnows!

What I’ve learned during my first week on steemit is that minnows (new members) like me, need support from the steemit community. In my opinion, minnows will get tired and drop out of the pool overtime if they don’t feel encouraged to continue.

Dolphins and whales should make an effort to support minnows. And what are dolphins and whales? They are steemit members that have a lot of influence because of their steem power, a huge number of followers and hold a lot of value on upvotes and comments of posts.

So all minnows are on some kind of a race to become a dolphin or whale. However, it isn’t easy at all, a minnow's post gets easily buried in the feed if it doesn’t have the influence it needs. I have learned this week that there are individual strategies out there like investing in steem for more steem power, upvote bots & #steemfollower to boost your influence over time.

However, Minnows can spend 5 hours or more writing a quality post and get only 3 upvotes and 1$ (or just a couple of cents!) within a day. On the other hand, not all but some, dolphins or whales will spend maybe an hour on a post that is literally just an image with a short paragraph and get 100 upvotes valued at $300. This does not seem fair at all.

Like all new systems, steemit is still in its beta version and it certainly has its flaws. The whole ''I’m Mr. Popular whale or dolphin and have 1000 followers'' can easily be seen as superficial. But we don’t want steemit to be seen like that! We want it to be a thriving community, right?! I want to be able to explain to my family and friends that steemit is the next best thing in social media. That it is not only a game of power and money, like too many systems out there.

So now, I am asking you fellow minnow, dolphin or whale, what are you doing for the steemit community? I have personally taken the challenge to do these actions daily:

• Take time time to upvote and comment on new member #introduceyourself posts
• Look for undervalued high-quality posts from minnows and read them. If I like the post (and not just because it can give me curator money), I upvote, comment and reesteem
• Find and follow new gems on steemit (this can be weekly)
• Take time to get to know minnows through the PAL network Discord channel of the #MinnowSupport Project and their steemit profiles
  https://steemit.com/minnowsupport/@manishmike10/welcome-to-p-a-l-minnow-support-and-the-discord-chat-the-key-to-my-success

So I ask again, what are YOU doing to make steemit a better place? What will YOUR action be to make this platform a great example of a thriving community?