Followers are important. Active followers who participate. 

By participation I don’t mean autovotes- although these are obviously important on Steem - but comments and most of all what Steem still lacks is good old-fashioned sharing: both resteeming and most definitely linking. 

While the UI isn’t optimized for resteeming, and Busy’s activity thread starts as a complete kitchen sink, sharing what you agree with and want to be seen more is key to how the internet works. Links are an integral pillar of the internet. 

Much is said about the difficulty to discover good quality and underrewarded authors but not much sharing happens. Too many do not make use of their own network to highlight what they want to be seen. While an upvote is awesome, a resteeming can sometimes do even more because it may lead to authors being discovered. 

So much is constantly done about _welcoming_ and that is important a thing but there’s still a huge drop off and many authors may have managed to cultivate a following in that period but only few will also be able to turn it into a living. Because we don’t sufficiently let others tap into our own networks nor actively highlight great content or similar thoughts. OCD, Curie, Cervantes do a great job. 

MrDelegation should also jump on that bandwagon and support more bootstrapped projects. At least give them a chance to prove themselves for few weeks with some thousands of SP before deciding whether they deserve more. 

Retention and social vertical mobility need lots of work still before Steem can claim to be as awesome as it has the potential to be. 

> I've held myself back many times to not start unnecessary fights when I noticed people doing this but it kept bothering me and I never wanted to stoop down to their level.

This is very admirable a trait. Much appreciated.