In principal I support the work of @steemcleaners etc. and people like @patrice have my witness vote for that reason. They should, in my humble opinion, stick to down voting people who clearly have no other motive than personal enrichment though. I'm not saying by any means that this is happening and I firmly believe that the intentions are good, however there is a potential danger in creating what could be seen as a self appointed vigilante police force. As undiplomatic as that youtube comment was, I do have some sympathy for that users position. I agree that the main aim of steemit should be community and the vast bulk of rewards should go to authors that create useful content. That being said many people have put significant sums of cash into steem tokens and I don't think it is entirely fair to say they shouldn't gain some return on that investment (more buyers and holders does put upward pressure on price after all). I see nothing wrong with upvoting ones own posts/comments within reason.

I personally use around 20% of my upvotes to upvote most of my own comments, I only do it immediately if I have some reason to want it noticed. Otherwise do it after a few days so that I don't unfairly place my own comments higher up the list, I for one don't always read to the end, I'm sure I'm not the only one, so comments higher up the list probably have a better chance to be up voted by others. If people see value in my comments they will push them up the list, the rest I use to up vote what I see as valuable content. Disagree with me if you will but I personally see that as a good balance between both viewpoints, others may place that line more or less in their favor and within reason I think that people should be able to make that call for themselves.

Many of the people that I see with large followings and adding high quality content, up vote themselves and also post content that is borderline shit posting, I assume just because they know they will be upvoted anyway. One could argue that sending SBD to upvoting bots is at least as bad, there are many ways to "game" the system. I think there are very few people here that have purely altruistic motivations. Community takes all kinds of people and some are more selfish than others, some just plain need the cash more than others, a dollar here or there is not insignificant to many people. Such is life ,and sometimes you just have to take the good with the bad. I know plenty of people that I wouldn't give the time of day to, but it is only the genuinely disruptive or dangerous ones that I would attempt to remove from my community.

That's my 2 cents worth if anyone is interested.

One thing I would be curious to see, if you were to say downvote the top 10% of pure scammers and use the rest of the voting power to just upvote good content thereby weighting that content more fairly, how would that affect the $ value of those projects?