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
I think to make the whole site keep functioning and moving properly everyone need to upvote lots whether that's newbies or the big Giants. nife post:-)
Thank you! Any reason no upvote?
I'm sorry! I did press it but my phone is a bit laggy I will re-up vote now!
Thank you very much appreciate it!
Great post. I love your use of emojis.
We need to show our support by upvoting good content
Thank you very much, and thank you for the upvote!
seeing as the whales have invested heavily in the site, they have helped. yeah it would help more if they all upvoted besides they might be busy helping behind the scenes to. I wouldn't be comfortable with penalising people for not voting anyway as those who don't want to upvote might just upvote the first so many posts they come across without looking to see if it deserves an upvote just to meet the requirements,
I guess for myself I would like to know that someone I'm upvoting for is actually upvoting others on a regular basis, especially if they are a top earner in the community. In life I tend to always help those that help others more so than those who always ask for help but never seem to be around when help is needed.
But I do see your point, and understand your not upvoting as you do not agree, thanks for your comment.
I don't believe it's necessary, yet willing to watch where this goes.
Thank you for the upvote! It may over time as we get hundreds of thousands of users, or even millions of users.
Adding transparency is almost always a good idea - thanks for posting this inspiration
As soon as I figured how to upvote, I started using that option. I also have to agree with hannahp 's comment below with keeping the site moving accurately by engaging the upvote and I've noticed by commenting (replying) and keeping a running dialogue going with others a method in gaining more steem, or at least from my perspective, that seems to be working out in my favor. Besides, if I genuinely like someone's article, naturally I'm going to upvote. It's pretty simple, I'd say.