Brian,
You are obviously free to upvote or not as you see fit.
And yes, if you find content on Youtube that people like and provide a link to it from here people may upvote it and help you earn some STEEM.
My motivation - and I can only speak for myself - is very different from "whoring for attention and votes". I could care less for recognition and attention for the sake of attention, and as a well-paid IT professional the couple thousand dollars I have made on Steemit so far does not make much of a difference. I seek to provide what I consider quality material to people, and whether it is mine or other people's makes no difference to me insofar as that objective is concerned. I have posted all sorts of stuff here - including my own articles and videos and photos as well as those by other people, always with attribution, of course.
Now as for your situation - it seems to be similar to mine which was also a bit slow out the gate. Here is a little manual on how you may speed up the progress for yourself:
https://steemit.com/upvotebot/@edolo/i-used-17-upvote-bots-on-this-post-come-check-it-out
Cheers!
Thanks for linking my post! Very kind of you!
I suspect this obsession with making money is partly the reason why the average quality of posts here is so low. When I initially started out here, I thought Steemit would be a bit like Medium, with a relatively small amount of high quality content. Alas, my feed seldom contains anything at all worth even opening, let alone reading or sharing.
And I see lots of people here typically follow 573625472 people and then have 300 followers. I.e. they follow anyone and everyone in the hope of being followed back. Lots of the people who start following you are people selling you (or trying to sell you) the promise of upvotes and shares in return for money. Steemit is a weird sort of stock exchange rather than a platform for sharing information. And like the real stock exchange, most people won't make much money here; now and then someone will make a fortune, or enough to live on.
Now I can't complain too much because my own reason for being on social media is also at least partly commercial in that I hope to get some activity on my website and sell some books or paintings. But on all the social media I have been on thus far, it is has always also been a fairly fun give and take, with lots of people making genuine efforts to share quality content.
Here, one has to plow through a great deal of crap to get to anything worth reading. Paranoid conspiracy theories, stuff plagiarized from the web, stuff taken from the web and then translated via translation software into incomprehensible gibberish (which nevertheless gets hundreds of upvotes)... that seems pretty much standard fare here. Virtually everyone seems to be more interested in finding ways to game the system than in communicating with fellow humans.
Well, I'll hang in there for a while longer and see what happens. Sometimes a thing grows on me after a while. :-)
EDIT to add something I forgot: Let me state that I don't mind if people share links to YouTube videos (or whatever other content). What bothers me is when it is just a link and nothing else. In this particular case I didn't bother to follow the link: I have a limit on my monthly data, and on my time, and I am not going to sit through a who-knows-how-long video just to see if it turns out worthwhile.
What would have been a higher quality post? Something like this:
Check out this video on spanking. It makes the interesting point that spanking harms children, but it is quite non-partisan and also presents the other side of the argument. It's about twenty minutes long.
Or something like that. Then I know that at least the poster actually watched the frickin' video himself, and has something real to say.
@brainvids I do have to say to be wary of flags when using upvote bots. My post was at $64 and got flagged all the way down to $18. But that was kinda my fault for promoting the use of upvote bots in the first place. Goodluck.