@Drakos I loved your informative post. Could you please tell me what is wrong with upvoting your own comments? After all, you upvote yourself when you post your blog. I agree there needs to be guidelines but I find it hard to understand a flag and run opposed to a reason for a flag like the bot smackdown.kitty. Appreciate your thoughts since you brought up that it is wrong to upvote yourself.
Upvoting posts and comments is allowed by the system. Self-upvoting is a debated issue. Technically there's nothing wrong with it. I do upvote all my posts (15-20 cents worth), almost everyone does that, but I rarely upvote my comments (I think I did that twice so far when I thought my comment was important). That being said, there are people with lots of SP that often upvote their comments. About two weeks ago, one whale upvoted his two-lined comment to almost $600!!! That sparked some very heated exchange. Other people use bots to upvote their comments, which many consider it abusive.
I have seen the bots used to upvote replies often. My latest post tonight has a perfect example of how it is done.
The guy probably automates a reply to posts over x amount, and then he also automates the bot upvotes to his reply.
It is definitely abuse imnsho.