Hello Tomas,

First I want to thank you for increasing the already generous rewards!

But I have to say that I really do not like the new rule that requires a resteem to take part in the photo challenge.

I have always resteemed your winner announcements when you featured one of my photos since these posts featuring my photography as a cover photo are also relevant to my followers. Apart from that, I am very selective on the posts I resteem.

Some other contests already do require a resteem - the killerpix contest to name one. Since I follow many photographers, I already see their announcement in my feed like five times a day, this is annoying. This is why I feel like contests that require a resteem to take part really only try to benefit their own popularity, but harm Steemit as a platform.

It would be great if Steemit at least had a function to hide resteems of posts that already appeared in the feed, but since there is nothing like that and the only option would be to mute you (which I really don't want to do!) I will probably see resteems of your contest announcements in my feed 5-10 times a day now and miss out on the content of the people I follow, the content that I am here to see.
And even if there was an option like that, I feel like resteeming your post every day would give people visiting my blog a hard time to find my own content upon all these resteems.

This is why I decided not to take part in such contests when I joined Steemit four weeks ago and your decision to require resteems is really giving me a hard time to decide if I will still be taking part in the 7 World’s Continents Photo Challenge. My blog would not be where it is now without your support, but for the reasons I have named above I think that having more resteems than own posts in my blog would impact the quality of my blog more than the exposure of taking part in more contests would help me to build a popular photography and travel blog.

I hope you will think about my arguments and maybe reconsider this step.

Cheers,
Julian