The cost of not upvoting

Elephant in the room

First of all I want to address this. I am not asking for upvotes from whales. I have been very well paid in the past in fact disproportionately so for example my terrible introduceyourself post. https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@william-noe/greetings-steemians
My plea is for the newcomers many of whom have been posting really good original content and are receiving little to nothing for their efforts. I also see what I would consider some subpar content receiving high rewards based on the posters reputation alone.

Is there a cost for upvoting

As far as I can tell there is no penalty for upvoting anything on this site your steem power goes down not your vested balance. In fact you are rewarded with vested steem when you upvote. When hard fork 8.0 was proposed I saw the writing on the wall. The curation rewards were set to some obscure algorithm where early votes did not go to the voters like they had in the past.
https://steemit.com/steem/@abit/new-curation-reward-algorithm-huge-penalty-to-early-voters
This effectively made new posts worthless to voters. Voters turned to the hot or trending posts if they were looking for rewards for their upvotes.

What is the cost

When voters turned away from new posts a lot of original content just got buried and never seen. I know it sucks to sort through the garbage that shows up on the new screen spam, re-posts and the like; but there are some real gems in there going largely unnoticed. How can the community expect to grow with this type of nepotism. Introduceyourself was good at first but came to be abused.

Unpopular proposal

This is probably a bit extreme but perhaps there should be a penalty for users who do not fill a quota of upvotes for a week. I personally try to upvote about a dozen posts a day even though my votes are worth less than a penny to the content providers. I look at steemd for many of the highest vested members and can fairly say that few of them upvote anything. Why not browse the new content and pick a minnow that is providing good content and make their day get them on the hot page for once.

Apologies

I’m sorry for my rant. I really love this site and what it means. I want more people to be included. I get tired of seeing the same people on the hot page day after day. I get angry that those who have been so richly rewarded fail to pay it forward to new comers. I don't want to point fingers or upset anyone; I'm merely observing and commenting. I'm asking for those who have been so blessed to upvote some of this great content before it goes away discouraged and unappreciated. I’m grateful I was earlier to this site and was rewarded more than I could have imagined. I hope to see less $1000 and $100 payouts and more $10 and $1 payouts and far fewer $0.01 payouts.

Respectfully
@william-noe