I was just reading a post by @Taskmaster4450 in which he asks, "Is It Time For Steem to Start Embracing Investors?"

https://steemit.com/palnet/@taskmaster4450/is-it-time-for-steem-to-start-embracing-investors

I had to think about that one. Good post, by the way. I typed up a long comment which leads me to re-evaluate my approach to Steem.

One complaint I read is, "there isn't enough quality content to curate".

With 50,000 active users, I find that hard to believe. What is likely happening is that you are limiting yourself to people you follow. Click on the New content stream and select All Tags. There are tons of content out there beyond the people you follow.

This likely brings us to the real issue, you follow people because they have high SP and they get tons of votes. Thus you can earn more from them than from some Plankton with two followers.

The real problem, if we're honest, is that there isn't enough profitable content to curate. There really is a ton of content out there that is pretty good, just not as profitable to curate.

If you were serious, you'd follow anybody and everybody to expand your feed and give you more opportunities to vote.

We Need to Support High Quality Content (thus we need to downvote)

Really? All you have to do is read posts, look at photos, and watch videos. This isn't rocket surgery or brain science. Do you really want to pass this off as a solemn and sacred duty to humanity? Suddenly you're Guardian of the Blockchain? It doesn't require advanced skill to sit there and look at stuff somebody else posted. Nobody is checking the quality of your votes. Support stuff you like no matter how stupid or pointless. If you like it, upvote. No need to be a snob about it.

I Declare My Intention

My intention is to enjoy Steem and max out my experience.

I'm Voting Everything 100 Percent

There is no point saving my votes or resources. We get more every day. It doesn't cost me anything to be spendy with my votes. Also, by blowing my entire upvote budget every day by voting 100%, I don't have to spend as much time voting. Because I lease out most of my Steem, my votes are worth about zero. So, it's dumb to vote 25 percent of zero. At some point, it will be more profitable to be active on Steem than to lease out my SP. I'll have to experiment once my SP is significant.

I'm Going To Instagram This All The Way

OK, not literally Instagram. But, I'm done worrying about the "quality" of my posts. I love short posts. I know a lot of quality snobs don't approve of shitposts. But, there's 50,000 of us active users. They can't downvote all of us. I bet we can post more crap than they can afford to downvote, if we put our minds to it. Again, we take this too seriously. If only we could have a good time, max out votes, max out posts, and be less critical of each other, we could grow Steem tremendously. We get paid to give away the farm. Yet, the way many behave on this platform you would imagine that we need to ration our activities to "only those that matter".

Something that just popped into my mind is that many of us owners, because all of us who participate on Steem are owners, behave like we have to ration Steem. Like we need to be conservative with our activity. In actuality, we need to do the opposite and be extremely generous. Hoarding will not save Steem. Giving it all away, all your resource credits and voting mana, ensures that we maximize the reward pool. This is the only way we can distribute the wealth to all Steemians rather than leave it in the wallets of a few big fish. By being tight-fisted with your votes and resources, you give the big fish more weight. Thus, all the other Steemians have less with which they can support YOUR work.

You Have To Play To Win

That's something the Lottery advertises. If you buy a lottery ticket, odds are you won't win. However, if you don't buy a lottery ticket, you definitely won't win. We have really good odds at winning on Steem. Buying Steem lottery tickets doesn't cost you anything more than some words and a picture. You might entertain somebody and win a big vote. You might only get the reward for posting. The tickets are practically free. There is no excuse for not posting as many of your lottery tickets as you can. Some will win. Some will lose. But, if you don't post, you definitely won't win. You have to play to win. You have to play as much as possible to increase your odds of winning. One or two posts a day is technically playing. However, it's barely an effort given how much you actually could post. All those unused resource credits are opportunities to win you wasted. If you REALLY want to win, wouldn't you take advantage of EVERY opportunity to win?

TL; DR

I'm done overthinking Steem. I'm not going to be a Steem snob. I'm going all out.