RE: Why is it important to follow and upvote small accounts? - The key to a healthy community growth.
i couldn´t have said it more accurately. It is not about upvoting minnows just for the sake of being minnows but to recognize hard work and quality where it is. It doesn´t matter if the content comes from a whale or a minnow, we should give credit where credit is due.
In the past I saw some very good posts getting 0.08 SBD and I have to accept I though "mmm I´ll upvote it but it is not worth writing a comment since i don´t care if this minnow follows me or not, let´s fish for the big whales". This thought I had it regularly on my first days of Steemit because let´s face it, when we start we are all out there fishing for Moby dick when in reality, we should be thinking bout carrying smaller fished on our back. There´s where the true community lies.
I know how that feels. Knowing you can get more rewards from curating whale's posts can make it hard to consider minnows and I've seen some great posts get ignored (particularly art). I've even tried resteeming a few but I'm not powerful enough for that to make much of a difference. When I submit a minnow's post to curie and it gets accepted I feel good knowing they at least they got rewarded for that work but there should be a more consistent relationship between quality and rewards (for minnows, dolphins, orcas and whales alike).
Totally true, that is why if we al get to the same train of thought of this post, quality will get rewarded sonner or later. I know, It needs more than just a few users to make a change, but If we manage to get more people involved in this idea then we are up to bigger things!
What I'd like to do (but don't have the technical skills to accomplish yet) is create another curation guild like curie. Steemit is growing quickly enough that it wouldn't be a competitor, it would just be another group with a similar purpose. The more functional curation guilds we have the fewer high quality posts would slip through the cracks.
There is a lot of curation guilds that do kind of what curie does. For example, in Spanish we have the curator @cervates and @spanish-trail they both dedicate fully to curate quality content in spanish. Maybe you could create your own country´s trail, where are you from?
I'm Trinidadian but there aren't enough of us on Steemit for that to make sense yet. I've seen some of the other guilds but I'm less sure of how they operate. I'll do some more research and see where best i fit in or if I really should start a new one.