Sorry if that came off wrong; I'm not trying to have a gotcha moment with you. It's just perplexing for me to comprehend the difference between the two. This especially when the blockchain considers both actions legitimate, the coding doesn't address morality at all. Whether it be "abusive downvotes" or "abusive self-votes." The abuse factor is subjective enough that it leads to so much drama. You know what I wouldn't mind seeing, is if the sum of "free downvotes" were distributed equally among all Steemians. It would at least give people the opportunity to defend themselves against abusive downvotes.

With your perspective on the matter, if you invest in Steem for the perk of the extra reward pool control, then the only benefit in that is that you get to become either an unpaid curator or and unpaid reward poolice officer. It changes slightly with the recent hard fuck, but this too is a very discouraging change for content creators. We were already fighting for scraps, but now the scraps just got scrappier. Meanwhile, trending is full of shit, all about Steem selling Steem to Steemians, preaching to the choir. It'd be nice to see a trending page that shows the top articles from several popular communities.