I encourage you and more of the whale community to start engaging and rewarding people for following your content and contributing to it with quality dialogue. Otherwise, what's the point for minnows? Curation bot upvotes or sharing $.03 minnow>minnow upvotes? Let's all emulate the very qualities that will help Steemit grow/retain its new user base who will do the word of mouth marketing the community needs.

Not many people are inclined to tell their friends to sign up to make pennies because it'll make them look bad, especially as the price of Steem is struggling.

It's hard enough to try to convince someone to put a little money into bitcoin, so Steemit is last on their list. This will not help the volume of unique visitors grow, unless Steemit becomes worth the time and effort, just like when entrenched whales make $300 for posting recycled news or a simple blog post for the sake of getting their buddies to hook them up, or upvote themselves a nice payday.

Any thoughts?