I agree with your sentiment @godfish - if you are voting for your own blog posts that's normal. If you are voting for the occasional comment to push it to the top of a heated discussion to make it more visible then that's also fine.
However - if you check out some of the people from the posts above. 'Tard's' recent comments are just the numbers up to 116 (https://steemit.com/@tard/comments) repeated, which they come back a few days later and upvote when their steem power recovers. In the past they just kept commenting 'test' and upvoting themselves.
I am not here to judge anybody. I don't have spare money to invest into Steem Power (If I counted it correctly, 100 Steem Power gives you about 0.035 USD per vote and cost aprox. 165USD).
So I just try to do my best and together with my friends we are building up the Czech community, since we all believe that Steemit's future is bright. And we want to help our fellows, most of them don't speak English enough to be able to write English posts. It is not easy but we believe in it. You can check it yourself: #cesky.
If I invested money into SP, I would most definitely support my mates and myself. It is an investition and I would expect some revenues of it. As anybody else. But still, I believe in sharing, mutual respect and donating, hence i wouldn't kept my voting power for myself.
Still, it is just a therory. Send me about one million SP and we will see :))
anyway, thank you for the discussion, I appreciate people like you. I am following you by now and I am pretty sure we'll continue our chat above some other post soon :)