Sadly it appears there are NO penalties but maybe there SHOULD be!
Here are my thoughts and a couple suggestions for @ned and @ dan
My Thoughts
Ok I have been reading many articles about whales that do not upvote, and what bothers me even more than that are Steemit members or Small Whales with thousands in Steem Power that post items and gladly take Upvotes from the community, but very infrequently Upvote other contributors.
I guess if you have a good following, and receive thousands per month in Steem from your post's then why bother upvoting to get a mezzly .01 SP.
Right?
Wrong!!!
In my opinion Upvoting is an amazing tool and we should all be using it! Just like voting in real life, if you are fortunate enough to live in a Country where you are allowed to vote, then vote!!
What can we do about it?
All of us on Steemit have the power to control our own destiny, and the destiny of others in the community.
We just need some guidance and the proper tools to help facilitate our actions
Suggestions
So I ask that the curators and other whales @dantheman @berniesanders , and others to see if these new informative tools below can be added near the members name so that all Steemit users can quickly see how involved in the community an individual that makes a post really is.
1) Next to the ranking number can we have another set of numbers showing how many upvotes the contributor has given in the past week.
2) Next to that number can we see how many upvotes the contributor has received in the last week.
The above suggestions would allow me to quickly gauge if a contributor has been upvoting other good quality content as well, and if they have not, then maybe I would like to move onto another posting and upvote a more active user instead?
A big THANKS to everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to read this posting