I love that in the initial stages of STEEM, I have been able to store away the value of my holdings and in turn receive the "special power" to inject shares in steem into various contributors' pockets. At this stage I do spend quite a bit of time reading posts and sometimes I even respond, but overall I just like to upvote decent content.
The reason why is simple to be honest...I love mining for the most valuable form of gold that exists---golden thoughts, passions and actions that bring humanity to higher levels of creation. And at this early stage, putting funds into any new users' wallets is only going to be a good thing as the user base rises.
Social mining is what I do on Steem. I upvote the stuff that looks good to me, but then I go out and intentionally upvote some stuff that isn't amazing but comes from an account that seems new or hasn't made any prior posts. I do this because I believe for those users to want to stay, they need to have at least a little bit more than 3 dollars of initial stake given to them for joining & participating this early on.
The next stage is going to be even better though...when I put 95% of all the money earned right back into more steempower---which will only empower me to pour more tokens into the hands of valuable content creators and other community members.
Steempower is a Beautiful thing and I wholeheartedly believe that in the earliest stages of steem's growth if all users try to share value with one-another regardless of their chances at receiving a high payout, simply to give a few dollars to someone who tried...we will reach the next tiers of growth relatively quickly. :)