Of course you can treat your upvotes as "likes". This is completely up to you. They're your votes. The question to ask yourself is what you want to accomplish on Steemit. If you want to read good content and spread "likes", good for you. I have no issue with that.

If you are wanting to help reward people for their effort on good posts, then your spreading of "likes" isn't helping them. It just makes you feel good about yourself. People on Steemit usually want to get some reward for their effort and .001 to .004 isn't going to do it. If you want to truly help them, then conserve your voting power and build your account so your votes are actually worth something.

Regarding curation trails. They sound nice. My posts get hit with a few trails each day. To be honest, 90% of the votes on trail appear as .000 on my Ginabot notification. I love that I got 35 votes in 10 seconds, but the actual value isn't significant usually after the 1st 3 to 5 people in the trail. Few of the people in the trail read my post and even fewer comment on it. Therefore, zero engagement, zero relationship building, zero long term benefits for either of us. Who benefits? Those first 5 people in the trail that improved their curation rewards off the following 30 to 70. I will do trails when they place my vote in the #2 position (won't happen, so I won't be doing trails).

Sorry for the two replies. I sandwiched a meeting in between these, but you're important and I wanted to respond.