Doesn't it depend on how you look at it? Suppose they were upvoting you 10 times a day...
You might look at it differently. The reward pool is split (something like 75% to authors and curators, 15% to witnesses and 10% to SP holders). As far as this discussion goes the last two have no influence. Suppose they were only curating, that would indeed mean they would influence the 75% because of curation. That 75% is again split in 75% for authors and 25% for curators. Because of this our vote would be worth less, our curation 'income' would be less. But at the same time if their curation would be uniformly split (ideal world), wouldn't our author rewards be bigger because they would be voting on our content? Wouldn't this also cause the whale circle jerking to be less effective because their vote would be worth less and their 'author' reward would be less?
I'm not sure if this is correct. One drawback for us would be they would receive curation reward as well. The system and the implications are just so complicated it makes me doubt they did this by design. It's just one big experiment.
One thing I do note in the tone of the discussion is the payout reward. We must remember we are payed out in steem. More users would mean a more uniformal spread of the payout, and thus on average a lower steem payout. If you want to keep the same USD payout that can only happen if steem to USD goes up.