I don't have as much of a problem with self-upvoting (and circle-jerking, the light version of self-upvoting). It's true, how else is somebody who invested 5 grand supposed to get anywhere here? I've tried, with great content (and contribution) for 2 years without a break, and it hasn't happened. I even have a wife and some models helping me produce content and make posts/comments. But we're still barely able to scrape together $0.02 (payout cutoff) without help from other curators, which is hard to come by without paying for it. I don't buy votes, but I occasionally self-upvote or have my team group vote on something so it manages to pay out. I wouldn't attack somebody on the sole basis that they're self-voting. Self-voting garbage (even posting garbage) is shitty and should be discouraged. But self-voting itself isn't a crime. It's not even against the rules, and is in fact encouraged by the blockchain settings, intentionally.
From my perspective, this might have been a sword you didn't need to fall on.
That said, maybe he's a spammer, and needs to be attacked for that. But we can't attack people for self-voting, and we can't even attack them for acting entitled to profit from their investment here. If we continuously discourage and drive off all the investors, the price will never recover.
His retaliation downvotes are lame indeed, but I can probably empathize with where he's coming from emotionally.