I have a few thoughts about this.

I believe that the content of the post, especially if it's good, is already a contribution by itself. What people do with their earnings should not matter. With that said, everyone is free to do as they please with their votes, as long as there's no abuse like vote trading or anything like that. Also, what constitutes good content varies from person to person, community to community, and even from platform to platform. I remember using 9gag a long time ago and memes, usually short ones, were the main content. If you wrote an essay, no matter how good it was, that was not the place to post it. Same thing here if I make a fantastic Splinterlands post in the music community, that's not good.

That's why I'm very against downvotes for any reason other than to combat abuse. If people like a post, it shouldn't be possible for someone else to come and say "you shouldn't like this post". Especially because only whales can do that and it creates a type of bullying.

Anyway, back to people being free to use their upvotes as they please. We can't forget that upvotes help the receiver as much as the voter. That means it's good to be frequently upvoting. I personally vote many of the posts in Splinterlands and a few others that I already follow.

Regarding your response to my other comment, about upvotes from contests, it should be up to the contest organizers. If they want, they can give a bigger upvote to people who power down, that's up to them, although that would be pretty weird. Specifically about the Splinterlands contests, there are 2 things to keep in mind:

1. What is the goal of the contests?

2. Who decides these rules?

To me, 1) is simple. It's to incentivize people to create content about Splinterlands and to reward those who do. Considering that not voting is throwing away money, might as well vote for people who play the game and are more likely to use the earnings to invest in the game. This brings up another question: what is more beneficial to Splinterlands? Someone earning and powering up everything into HP or someone selling every bit of Hive to spend on Splinterlands? I have no doubt that the second one is the best possible outcome for Splinterlands.

This ties into 2). Who owns the accounts doing the voting? Whenever I get the vote it's from steemmonsters but sps.dao, yabapmatt, and postpromoter follow the vote automatically. I don't know if postpromoter is related or not but it's not too relevant since it's the lowest vote of the 4. Steemmonsters I believe belong to the team, yabapmatt is his personal account, of course, and finally sps.dao. Yabapmatt is free to vote however he pleases and so is steemmonsters ultimately his decision (if he doesn't delegate the decision). However, sps.dao belongs to the SPS stakeholders.

Why did the rules recently change? Was it because someone convinced the team to change? While I don't agree with that, if the team is ok with it, that's fine. However, shouldn't we have a vote to see who and how the sps.dao votes?

I'm not even someone who powers down. Only once I started a power down of 1 HP because I needed it for something and when I saw how long it would take I stopped. And I did power up a bit at some point. I remember selling a few vouchers, already after the CL pre-sale, because I used peakmonsters to rent cards and I was always running out of RC. I don't know if I powered up again and I sell most of the liquid rewards to have a few more funds for Splinterlands. I also saved up $100 in HBD (worth a bit more now) and have it staked. I don't know if this is considered enough or not to be eligible for the rewards. I know I'm not one of the people who takes everything and takes out, otherwise I wouldn't have over 3k HP.