I've noticed your giveaway posts and personally found them to be at the far spectrum of "abuse", i.e. if I were to actively attempt to break those up you'd be the last person I'd touch, but I guess everyone and their stake decides things differently.

Similar to what I assume the initial downvoters opinions in this post I don't think self-votes are that bad but I'd argue if you're already doing quite well and consider potential "votetrading" that may occur either genuinely or pre-determined it kind of just seems like an unnecessary additional weight on top of already doing quite well. I'd say self-vote if you feel like your post didn't get appreciated as much as you hoped for if that one felt special and a lot of work went into it. This could potentially end up getting you more support as well if you wouldn't self-vote as people would notice it and decide to support you partially because of that.

If you're constantly self-voting, though, and especially on posts that may seem low-effort it does give the impression that you're mainly doing it for the ROI. My biggest issue with these giveaway posts are some that spam them and make it their primary resource of growing their HP by giving away a fraction, here's an example I noticed just today because they used the zing tag: @pepe.voter/posts
That's like 50 posts with pending payout. It's hard to argue they're doing it for the sake of helping random users get some tokens, game assets or promoting the project and easier to assume they're doing it for the returns or "investing" in the upvotes becoming stronger over time.

Anyway, just thought I'd share my opinion. One thing I don't like is when people instantly say things like "downvotes will destroy hive" etc, it's just a few downvotes after you've been rewarded for years without anyone touching you. Let's calm it down a little. I know it's not fun to receive downvotes, especially when they're done as retaliation, etc, but it's not the end of the world and in general "bad downvotes" aren't that common these days as they used to be in the past so it comes off a little dramatic painting them the way some do.