seemingly unrelated to the post they're made against and are clearly made solely to ask you for a reciprocal upvote but is that spam? probably not.

If they are unrelated to the post they might be spam. They might be a bot. Some of the most active community members here comment up to 200 times a day. @xzibit posted 1619 comments in a 24 hour period not long ago. A look at the comments showed they were most likely bot comments. Most users won't dedicate 10 hours a day commenting. You can only post 1 comment every 20 seconds.

As @patrice said in chat i reference to spam and copy/paste:

They see dollar signs growing on trees. They either don't know or care how the money is made and whether or not they'll kill the money tree.

They do not care to be part of steemit if they have no wish to be part of our community or care about steemit, the value of STEEM/SBD, or the success of steemit.com.

I'll post my criteria for what I consider spam in more detail but more or less it comes down to intent. Anyone not commenting or posting with the intent of engaging in conversation or providing a service to the community and be a part of it is in my opinion spamming.

Both large scale spam and dust spam if it is prolific enough has an impact on our community but not not all spam needs to be flagged into oblivion. I'm mainly concentrated on users running more than one account with voting trails they own, borrow, or rent and those commenting excess of the most active members here as they may be bots. The rest I'll comment on and report to @steemcleaners.