I usually try and go through all of my comments and leave a decent reward for people who actually bother to write a few sentences and who obviously have read and have an opinion on what I've posted.

I also try to scale the votes so the better comments (in my opinion) rise to the top and I leave the "good post" "good job" "nice" etc alone. Maybe each time I get one of these spammy replies I should say "nice reply", then go to that person's account and copy and paste "nice reply" on their 10 most recent spam comments. Maybe a nicer way of teaching a lesson than flagging?

I agree these spammy comments shouldn't get votes but somehow they do. I don't really like downvoting people unless they really piss me off so usually I'll just ignore the spam. But that in itself may be me being part of the problem. Perhaps we should all be a bit more proactive in educating new users that this isn't how you earn / interact on steemit. For flagrant abusers who appear to have multiple accounts set up to upvote their own spammy comments I think downvotes are in order.

My favorite of all time is still "pls upvode me". That was left on one of my wife's posts months ago and we still joke about it. There's more of a story to it and it's pretty funny but I'm getting into dissertation territory here with the length of my comment so I'll stop.

Happy friday to you.