Someone Please Tell Me How This Works?!

All I want to know is how to successfully make money upvoting or make steem and get steempower. How does steempower help yourself and why don't people with steampower just help everybody and upvote all the new posts that come out. It will help themselves too. This site is a very community based money making system. Of course it was very easy to make money at the beginning, but now that more people are joining, the harder it is for members to get noticed.