Step 1: @teamsteem, I appreciate your positive content and effort on Steemit. You stay composed and constructive when people bash based on their personal opinions.

Step 2: Some random thoughts/venting triggered by your comments above. Probably not valid for this main blog, but hopefully for this sub-string.

I think whales who want to help Steemit grow (you're certainly one of them), should be able to sign up to have a small school of minnows assigned they can get to know, support, mentor, and upvote appropriately to help build them up. Bringing the minnows up to a certain level should be nice experience, and then set them free (while having the relationships to last). This would help whales focus on growing positivity instead of prioritizing negative activities. Better yet, they'll have people looking up to them so they'd be more likely to remain professional and respectful. Maybe this exists already, but I'm new and don't know.

I hate seeing people sneak themselves 100% upvotes when it's to pad their own pockets, or to try to get themselves to the top of a chain to get more attention for upvotes on a hot debate. It's greedy and becomes a popularity contest. I upvote myself for $.01-$.04 sometimes (my puny max) to try to get noticed above someone who isn't upvoted at all, as a meager effort to say "hey, please find my post", not to pad my pockets with a penny of SP/SBD.

What's worse, I've seen upvoting of quality comments on a whale/dolphin's posts at the minimum upvote %, or none at all, and then them upvoting all of their own replies down the chain 100%. Over and over, every reply 100% to them and 1% to their "host". That's sick to me and something should be done to curb that manipulation.

People also seem to spend their 100% upvotes spread around their curation reach in slivers, when they can really make a significant impact by sharing them with a few people a day to motivate and inspire them. This circles back to how the whale/school concept could help to retain a lot of new users. It's not really costing any money, just voting power and some light curation rewards.

A lot of whales get the bigger picture that getting people to sign up is the easy part. Keeping them motivated to build on the platform and grow seems to be delegated most to bots you pay for to get a small % of profit for bought upvotes. A hands on approach while the active user base is still small, can do a world of good for raising minnows into dolphins to repeat the cycle down the line.

Also, I wish there was a way to reduce the spam of people sending out "news" videos of other people's hard work in the form of Youtube videos, and thinking that citing their source in a quick sentence is called "quality posting". People are getting paid to do it every day in bulk to get payouts and there's nothing stopping them from this lazy spam. It makes my blood boil. I won't name names, but these copycats are everywhere.

Hope this can help you at all since you have the muscle to do something! Let's not have Steem just trickle down. We can all do better than that to keep the community growing!

I also appreciate a lot of the general concern for minnows by others in this thread. Thank you.