OK as an example, you post a more or less good photo essay, I have been following you and I normally like your content, my vote is worth say $5.00 and I decide that your posts deserves a $5.00 vote, nothing wrong with that, I like the post I vote what I think it is worth, and it is just normal that I will vote for authors whose content I normally like. Where it gets out of hand and I think is bad is when I have you on my autovoter and it automatically upvotes anything you post even if it turns out to be, a shit post. And this is constantly happening, I sometimes take the time to see a post by one of these heavily voted "authors" shitty content most of the time but five minutes after it is posted that post is suddenly voted by 50 or 80 users and its reward goes up to ten dollars. That is what I consider circle jerking something getting upvotes just because it is on some auto bots list, and this is reciprocal. As for someone deciding to give a big dollar vote to a post he considers deserves it I see nothing wrong in that, after all we each have our own opinions about quality and I cannot say my opinion is better than yours so I can spend my votes however I want to, but I would want this to be done manually. This is why I think downvoting a post because it has to high a reward is kind of dumb.
I totally agree with manual voting and decent comments like yours here.