When you include the words in his pictogram, the character count on krnel’s post is 640. If you compare that number to the count in your previous post (which is 740), the difference in content volume is 11.11%. However, your previous post got rewarded 67.14% more than his, and that’s with your upvote included. Sure, you could have flagged yourself, but that would have been weird.

You may have noticed with the steem-engine tokens that the success or failure is linked to the token’s utility. Some people have given their token a utility by creating a sink and exchanging their VP for the token. Whether this is a real utility, is debatable. However, this is how the tokens which have a market value, stay in demand.

Steem created a similar incentive when they made their token. The more steem power you have, the more rewards you can draw from the pool, and this is what got people to come out of pocket and purchase Steem in the first place, it was the lure of more rewards. So, people buy Steem to reward others or themselves as they see fit, and there is merit in buying and HODLing steem.

When people buy Steem, it shows market activity and gives Steem a real-world value. When the people power-up or HODL, it creates scarcity and thus secures a more stable price on the market. However, when Steemians downvote other Steemians, they attack the merit of the stake of others, and this encourages people to stop HODLing, power down, and sell. It can also discourage would-be investors from joining in at all.