The "circle jerk" is a natural phenomenon in the crypto token life cycle. Bitcoin was the same way, but worse, for the first several years. Every day on Reddit the front page was all articles on why Bitcoin is great and articles about merchants accepting BTC to legitimize it to the mainstream. The short-term incentives with crypto-tokens are such that everyone in the community wants to champion the virtues of the token . This is very natural and I actually think its not as bad on Steem thus far because Steem Power better aligns long-term incentives (so the ST price of the token isn't talked about as much).

While everyone can do their best to not encourage it, my view is that its inevitable and it's not something to worry too much about.