I don’t think so!
There are a lot more reasons behind the seemingly simple action of pushing the upvote button. I’ve been thinking about these for a while and I’m gonna list all the different kinds of reasons one would upvote. Some of these I do myself, others not.
You actually like what you read, or the pictures you saw, so you upvote the post, simple as that. You are entertained or educated and you think it’s quality content. This is of course the preferred reason for the majority, because Steemit was meant to be used in a way that the community together upvotes (or flags) according to the value they find in the post.
You upvote certain people, what ever they post. They are your friends and you want to support them, even if it’s a shitpost. It’s not circle jerk, it’s called friendship. You might not like, for example, comics, but because your friend makes them, you upvote the post because you want to show you appreciate them as a person and you like his other work. If you are not willing to support your friends first, and a random person second, I think you need to check your priorities. It’s the same thing in real life, you support friends and family first, at least that is what I think you should do.
You have invested in the platform and you want to get a return for you investment by earning curation rewards. A person like this probably sets automated votes to people that are constantly getting good rewards, so they can just sit back and earn passive income. You might also be a smaller user, or mid level, or anyone, just trying to raise your stake with getting small curations rewards every day.
Some people spread an insane amount of worthless upvotes everywhere they can, to try and catch the attention of as many people they can, in the hopes of getting some upvotes back. Some others might fangirl a certain whale by upvoting their every post and comment. There are sure a lot of people who upvote the picture of a cute girl’s lunch, in the hopes of getting her attention.
The post might be good, or it might be bad, but someone is telling about their hardship and you want to help, so you upvote. Or maybe you want to help out a newer user to get his Steemfest ticket, so you give a 100% upvote to help him out.
This ties in a bit with the charity upvotes, but not quite the same thing. There are so many different community projects on Steemit, for example minnow support or curie, and you like what they do, so you upvote their posts, even when you might not even open them.
You upvote posts that have some valuable information, some that you might not even need yourself, but want to help spread the word. These would be for example tutorials, warnings about phishing attempts and how to protect your private keys.
This one is going to make someone mad, but I’m here to speak the truth. If you are a bigger user, you might have some fans who draw pictures of you or make a whole post about praising you. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s shit that you wouldn’t otherwise upvote, but because they went to trouble to do that about you, so you give a courtesy upvote. And don’t get your panties into a bunch, I’m of course not talking about YOU. YOU are of course brilliant and everything you do is beautiful and wonderful!
This one should be pretty self explanatory.
I don’t think any of these reasons to upvote are wrong per se, or that people shouldn’t do them, but some are definitely more frowned upon than others. I'd say more than anything, do all of them in moderation. Let's have a discussion in the comments!
