Well, I totally agree that we help our friends; and presumably we have something in common with our friends or they wouldn't be our friends. I'm likely to upvote my friends on Steemit, and have hopes they might return the favor. In a sense, that's the core of the being social part.

Part of the circle-jerkiness here — as best I can interpret it — is that a bunch of the participants don't actually care about each other's stuff, they are just trading favors. My guess is that you would probably NOT hire your friend Victor if you needed fine cabinetmaking, and he was a shit framing carpenter. At some point reality has to kick in.

The biggest challenge we seem to face around here is — to paraphrase you a bit — that we "we look at $ in other people's accounts instead of growth of our own" to which I say YES, and people get wrapped up in short term gains rather than long term growth. Which is a variation on people choosing two "full buckets" TODAY, rather than the value of a steady flow into their bucket for the rest of their life.

Maybe those $200 worth of paid upvotes from bots look really good right now, but if the consequence is that in a year from now Steemit has a global reputation as a "spammy joke" and the Steem token ends up at $0.05... just how clever is that, really?

=^..^=