In many ways @liberosist is correct. It might not be precisely the same thing, but it is similar in many ways.
The key difference is that @ats-david votes for himself presumably because he believes that the content that he is posting meets some subjective critera of "good". TITS he votes for the content, not the person.
SG curators get their whale vote as a reward for work allegedly done in the service of SG. Getting whale upvotes for low quality posts (many of which are borderline plagarist or barely coherent) which, presumably, would not otherwise receive them is part of your model, and its not a part of @ats-david s. (and as i noted in the thread with smooth below, when your stated purpose is to increase the exposure of good content, but youre funding the endeavor with undeserved (based on quality of content alone) upvotes on relatively low quality posts, then it really begs the question: what are you really trying to accomplish?
Personally i think ATSD's posts are normally of a high quality, even the ones that cover topics like sports that don't interest me particularly. If ATSD got a bunch more whale followers like the vals and the michaels, and if he started posting incoherent plagiarist drivel 4 times a day and self-upvoting it as a reward for his curation efforts on other posts, Then yeah, hed be almost as bad as SG. Still no threats (that i know of) or downvoting critics (that i know of) but almost. Then again without the "for the good of steem" rhetoric that SG uses, hed probably lose most of those whale followers if he did that.