Great points all around.

"Most of the time, the author doesn't even know."

I have no idea when my work gets resteemed. In fact, I stopped getting all notifications months ago. I hope people don't think I am ignoring them, but I don't get pinged when mentioned in posts or any kind of pop-ups anymore. Not sure what happened.

I only see that someone has resteemed me when I am looking through their blog pages and see one of my own articles.

For these reasons, I don't find it at all tacky when someone drops into a comment that they are resteeming. I appreciate it, as otherwise I wouldn't even know.

It really is very important to keep your blog "you" at first. Filtering through resteems is mental work for your prospective viewers, and you don't want to make following you work.

I try to resteem mostly only to give a platform to smaller users with something high quality and under-rewarded that I don't have enough voting stake to reward adequately, or help with some vital issue that is often humanitarian in nature.

Thanks for stopping by, geke!