Self-upvoting isn't really the issue. I still do it, even though I am phasing it out.

But HE does it with an account with roughly an $8.50 upvote AND a couple of other alts that have $2-3 upvotes. If you combine that with a whole cadre of orcas with $2-4 upvotes, it's pretty easy for him to dig into trending like a tick with little to no effort. Once he gets on to trending, he gives practically zero engagement. As a matter of fact, I've seen him skip over customers/upvoters trying to engage with him to downvote his critics. That's if he even bothers to check, as he's just pushing his steem posts via steempress.

I don't know if I would call it spam, but the majority of it is not worthy of the rewards they are getting compared to the anyone else here. He is well aware that is the argument against him. If he want's to emotionally revenge downvote unrelated posts, he can, but as you can see the community at large is growing pretty tired of the bullying.

And the rewards come out of a pool by the way, the more leaches you have attached to it, the less there is left for people putting in the actual work.