For the most part, I prefer to using my voting power for upvotes... THAT SAID, I usually reserve flags for obvious copy-pasta; someone who goes around and leaves 100 identical comments, typically showing they have NOT read the post, in the first place. If it's really bad, I might invoke SadKitten or Spaminators.

I will also flag rampant self-upvoting... someone who puts "nice post" all over the place and then gives themselves a 100% upvote for that.

I tend to be less inclined to put much energy into someone who "purchases" lots of upvotes, as it is generally a losing game, in the long run... except for making the upvote service richer. You throw 1 SBD (let's say) at a service, and MAYBE you get a $1.50 boost. Which then declines to $1.20 by payout time, and you lost 25% to curation. So now you paid $1 to get 90 cents. It's like playing "odds" and "evens" in roulette... the house ALWAYS wins, because there's 0 ans 00.

Sure, the whole thing is somewhat subjective... we each have our own vision of what we hope Steemit will become. In my case, my voting patterns reflect what I believe will help the long term survival of Steemit...

... and most of these self-actions tend to be very short-term oriented.