I am a dolphin on steem, I have been around for a while and have 50k+ SP. That is a decent chunk of change for me and comes with a little bit of responsibility to use this power wisely and to the benefit of both myself and this platform.
To that end I try to be active here on a daily basis, at least reading and upvoting content. When doing that I look for two things:
- I am a little selfish and I want to earn some form of curation reward. It is not the only priority but most of the time a factor.
- I focus on new authors or unpopular authors that write decent content
The thing is that both of these strategies actually work together, because when there are not many up votes you will gain most of the curation rewards since you will have contributed close to all or a great majority of the voting power. As a result this is actually a very profitable strategy. And btw this includes comments on your own and other posts.
And it is simply good to support the up and coming.
Let me show you an example. Below is a screenshot of my curation reward. You can see I got some decent money (1.9SP) for a post from exxodus. Thats a lot for me. This is a little bit of exception because I was the first guy to up vote and then some other guy put a bigger vote ontop, which is perfect for my curation reward. This shows, discovering great content that then gets uprooted by others is still the best way to gain curation rewards and you can't lucky this way.
However I want to take a look at the rewards from dkpoker. As a poker player I value poker content and dkpoker has posted lots of it, even though he did not get much rewards for them yet. So I want to reward him and my votes should mean a lot for him relative to what he is used to. This is a perfect way for me to use my tiny bit of influence and reward content that I like to see here.
Below is the actual post and who voted on it.
Practically all the voting power came from me. As a result I get a pretty a large portion of the curation rewards, which is $1.22. or 1 SP.
Making 25% of what we give away in votes is a pretty good deal since this is what curation should yield on average and if you are not a bot, you will likely do much worse than this most of the time.
As a result you can combine your desire to be financially effective, support the platform and vote for things that you like very well by voting for unpopular post and especially from new users.
If you do this then you increase the level of decentralization of steem and help new users and grow the value of this community all by putting a bit more money into your pocket at the same time.
So I encourage you to do it more.
Of course I don't only vote like this. There are many post I simply like and then I will up vote them. You can see an example above from the post from 
But overall I think it is healthy for both my immediate financial income and for the platform as whole if we spend some of our energy in finding that special content author that has not been discovered yet, reward them and make steem do what steem has been designed to do.
Thanks for your attention and votes!