Has anyone else noticed that some of users have been giving extremely small upvotes lately? While there is nothing new to Steem having a very top heavy distribution of Steem Power and the vast majority of Steem users having not much more than the 15 SP delegated to them by Steemit, Inc, Steemit the user interface does not allow anyone to have a voting power slider unless they have at least 500 SP. This means that anyone having less than that will always vote at 100% of whatever voting power they have at the moment.
Some other front ends allow all users to have a slider. What I'm talking about is users with a tiny amount of SP using their sliders on some apps to upvote at a very small percentage of their current voting power. Like someone with 18 SP using their slider to upvote at 1%.
The lack of a slider for those users of Steemit with less than 500 SP is no accident. There is such a thing called the dust threshold which means that if a post or a comment is getting less than 0.02$ (Steen Token Units) at the time of payout, the payout will be zero and the rewards will go back to the pool. The dust threshold is slated to be discontinued in HardFork 20 scheduled to take place next month.
That said, many users give extremely small upvotes to posts that often, and always in the case of my posts, get much more than 0.02$ because I always upvote them myself with the about 2,600 SP that I have at my disposal. I'm grateful for every single upvote I get despite some of them being so small as to not amount to much financially. Those who give those tiny upvotes, however, might be doing themselves a much bigger favour - at least when upvoting users who have a decent amount of SP but who rarely get more upvotes than are easy to read in one glance. When you upvote people like that, you're effectively advertising yourself. I think that's just fine. In fact I find it vastly better than writing vacuous boilerplate comments and not upvoting my posts at all, or even worse, upvoting your own comments on top of that causing them to float upwards.