The question from the title is something that I want to discuss with those who would like to comment.

So, do you upvote the author or the post?

Yes, I know what the most of you would say:

There are too many posts to read, we can't check them all, but we know who are our favorite authors and we give our upvotes to them!

I would ask another question to the same people:

Do you feel disappointed when you see same names on TRENDING page every day?

And the most of you would say "YES" without hesitating!

And exact reason for that is our way of upvoting!

No matter if you have more or less Steem Power, your day lasts for 24 hours. And you are not the whole day on Steemit, if you are normal person, you have other things to do in your life. We all here depend on our supporters and the most of us know who they are and we support them back. So this is the way of thinking of an average Steemer:
"This guy supports me from beginning, and I support him! I will give my upvote to him, no matter what he just wrote down, I don't need to check it, because he is my supporter! I don't have time to read the post, I will not open it, just upvote it!"

Well, it's more than nice to have every day supporters!

We made really effective and strong community on Steemit and it's really beautiful how we support each other and watch each other's back. So we got used to support the same people and the most of Steemit users don't open the posts of others, just upvote it!

The funny thing is that there are many really "STEEM POWERful" users that think the same way. They just got a habit to support the same users every day and that's the main reason why we have the same names on TRENDING page every day!

I can tell you this from my personal experience:

When somebody who had Hive account@ned's key upvoted my posts every day for three months, I got used to get rewards 10$+ every day. I always had more than 80 upvotes and rarely more than 8 views. So, in that period, somehow, I stopped to care about my content! And I posted slim posts with no real message in them, just few photos and few quotes just to fill the lines between them. I was receiving rewards every day but the quality of my posts was bad! I didn't like what I was becoming so I had to do something.

The point is, Steemit can easily turn to a platform where publishing of trash can get you awesome rewards! And we don't want that, so something has to be done! Maybe some kind of restriction of upvoting the same people? Nobody can force you to read every post, but if there wasn't any "upvote button" on the list page, you would be forced at least to open each post that you want to upvote!

Thank you!