In general I kind of feel as though I paid for my steem power and I will upvote myself if I want. I certainly upvote others when I read something I like. I do believe in flagging of crushing proportions for spam and blatant plagiarism.

I add myself to the list of people though that came to this platform for the theory of how it would work and was let down by the way it actually works. I have had some very generous upvotes from whales when I posted content that they thought was good for the platform.

I think an interesting thing people don't really think about is that if a whale sells their vote it actually does a better job at distributing SP than if they self voted so condemning the practice could be short-sighted. I am assuming in this case that the whale takes the steem or sbd they sell their vote for and sells it rather than powering it up which I think is probably what most of them would do.