I'm new to Steemit, but in these few days I have tried to galvanize a small corner of this community into a shared sense that there really is a community rather than scattered individuals.
I have done that by posting a little, but mainly through commenting and upvoting not just the articles but other people's comments too. For my efforts I now curate the 
I mean, has anybody actually tried to drain their percentage of voting power? I'm not sure if one can see it on Steemit, but go over to chainBB and look at your own profile; there you will see your Voting Power as a Percentage of your current Steem Power.
Steemit is Not a Zero-Sum Game
Use it or lose it, seems to be the motto of how voting power works. In the sense that you cannot go beyond 100%. It will slowly rise to 100% but after that you are not filling up any longer. So you may as well use it to the full while online and let it recover when you're doing something else - like sleeping.
Admittedly, sometimes you may upvote a comment and it goes up to $0.00! This may be disheartening, but I assume it has gone up, even if by a micro-cent. And if you add up thousands of people voting hundreds of times those microcents add up. And as those cents turn into dollars you will be collectively thankful of all those comment votes.
Your Votes Are Like Gold Dust
So don't worry about the mathematics of it, just experiment with how much community building power you truly have.
In chasing those nuggets of pure gold, we may sometimes forget that gold dust is also highly valuable. Think of upvotes as a sprinkling of community gold dust.
