Why Are Curation Trails Popular?

Golden greetings and silver salutations! The following post may sound ignorant or ungrateful, but I am confused about something. Why Are Curation Trails Popular?

When I first started on Steemit, I got hooked pretty quick. I was hooked enough to buy enough Steem to obtain a slider pretty quickly. It took me a while to figure out how much to upvote. Sometimes I would only upvote 5% or so. At that time, I remember getting flat out called out for being cheap with my vote. I also remember seeing a post where someone said how they would rather have no votes than a 1% vote. So just going off pure memory, I feel that it used to be considered wrong to give tiny votes. Now onto today....

I am a member of a few pretty awesome organizations. They keep me around even though I have been writing much less. Frankly, I have a lot of really great (but time consuming) things happening in my personal life. But every once in a while, like yesterday, I wrote.

I look at my votes and I have almost as many upvotes as ever! Sweet...right?!? Well, upon further look, about 15 of these votes are under 1%. UNDER 1%! Of course, at this tiny size, none of them are even worth a penny.

What benefit is there to these microscopic votes (as low as 0.02%)? Does a vote, no matter how small, help my reputation? Do these folks ever remove their votes and revote when they read someone's content (and they enjoy it)? Does padding your upvote numbers do anything?

I do not want to seem ungrateful, I just do not understand what is the point of giving out hundreds of minuscule votes to random folks. I would rather have just one of those people read my post and give me a real vote.

What are your thoughts? If I have anything incorrect, please feel free to correct me.

Until next time, keep stacking and supporting #SteemSilverGold, #SteemUSA, and #TheAlliance!

Oh yeah...I need a thumbnail for this post, so:

I picked up that good ol' Steemit logo here: