edit just curious What is the reason you decline payouts?
By voting for my "payout declined" comments and posts, you are supporting the highest-quality-community-approved-content of the top-earners!!!
When you vote for something that's "payout declined" your contribution goes directly into the "reward pool" which gets distributed to all the posts that make more than $20 steem, with the highest percentage of the pool getting distributed to the top-earners who are providing the highest-quality-community-approved-content!!!
So you're not contributing your steem to me, you're contributing your steem to whoever the whales decide "deserves" your steem (but I still get a small rep boost).
Why am I declining rewards?
Imagine a "democratic" system, where you could vote for your elected officials, but your vote only "counted" as much as you "invested" in the election system itself (election tokens)... Now that by itself sounds reasonably "fair".
bUT, now imagine that anyone with a larger "investment" in the election system could ERASE your vote?
Would you continue voting? Or would you just give directly to the candidate of your choosing?
Also, imagine steem without voting. Imagine they just Hard-Forked voting right out of the whole thing altogether.
What's left?
A lot of really awesome stuff, that's what!!
The delegation system is amazing (way better than pa.treon). The steem-token transfer system is amazing (way better than v.enmo or credit-cards or banks). The blogging system is amazing (way better than tw.itter or fa.cebuk). It's all super-awesome!!