I have no clue as to what is acceptable; I was surprised to find upvote services but haven't signed up for any. So far all my votes came naturally, but recently someone showed how he missed out on income by not voting on his own posts so I tried that on a few of my own and wonder if I shouldn't do that on all my posts. Trouble is, if I do that, I won't have any voting power left for others and I'm down to about 65% as it is.
That is by far the most acceptable and still the best way to vote in my opinion, I had started to use an external voting pool that rewards you for voting on fellow members posts prior to my Christmas vacation but I am done with that because of the general vote direction of that group.
Apparently there is a way to give less than your normal upvote on purpose to conserve your power as well but I have not figured this out. I now know this is the case because the pay per vote whales are able to change the weight of their votes based on how much you pay them.
Yep, I think you have to have a certain amount of Steem Power before you get to control the weight of your vote. So far my vote is worth only $0.01 at 75% and 100% and nothing at 50%. Where the threshold is, is unknown to me at this time. Edit: If you go on steemworld (dot) org there is a slide labeled "voting value" that you can grab and move around. I can go down to 71% at this time.
Thanks for the information, that site is nicely programmed but I am opting to keep my keys private for now and vote with my normal percentage and I wonder if the next version of steem (non-beta) will have this vote weight changing feature?
{edit- at least the account displays an easier to navigate followers list though}
Yes, it's an easy way to keep track of comments, responses, payouts and such. Especially with comments, I find it to be the quickest way to stay informed as to who is active. Happy new year!