Is Self-Voting Okay?

Time to revisit an "old" topic

I remember seeing much more discussion about self-voting in the early days. People against it were mainly arguing that it is unfair, greedy and selfish to do so. It obviously becomes problematic when the stake/HP gets high. Everyone would disagree if one of the top whales regularly upvoted their own posts, it does not only place their posts instantly on the trending page, but it also amounts to considerable vote farming of the reward pool. However, an argument from the pro side is that one has essentially acquired that stake and should be free to decide what to do with it...

Personally, I always thought that it's okay as long as it's not above a certain threshold, like stake (whale status, 200k+ HP?) or a % of the total upvotes received (maybe 10% of the total?). But that threshold is obviously very blurry and open for discussion.

@galenkp has just recently started to downvote my posts because of self-voting (he was kind enough to clarify the reason when I asked him). So... maybe with around 150k HP I am a big enough orca to stop doing so?

How wide spread is self-voting?

By following the vote trails I did some small research into this. It's clear to me that while self-voting is not an all too common practice (especially for the big accounts - I couldn't find a whale doing this), it's still being done by many larger accounts. After around 15 mins I found 7 accounts participating in this practice (min $1 self vote value):

User	Reputation	$ Self vote Amount
@stayoutoftherz	79	4.1
@zuerich	71	2.4
@emrebeyler	76	2.3
@encouragement	67	2
@jedigeiss	74	1.4
@trumpman	88	1
@nuthman	74	1

These are some pretty big numbers by some pretty old and "reputable" accounts and so far it has gone "unpunished" (@galenkp you might want to adjust your downvote settings). Many of these authors also frequently make posts, so it's not a one time thing. Interestingly, these accounts also receive whale upvotes by @trafalgar @solominer @curatorhulk @theycallmedan @balte @leo.voter @stoodkev @appreciator @haejin @ocdb @blocktrades of which many are Hive witnesses or play an important role in the Hive ecosystem...

So, are they aware of this? And if so, do they think that self-voting is okay? In the end I guess it's a personal decision, since there is no law or even an argument that is completely persuasive. We are free to disagree here. But it seems to me that self-voting is at the very least not being sanctioned by the large stakeholders as long as it is not being done in an abusive way (like making 10 posts a day and upvoting them all).

So what's your opinion on this issue?

[edit:]

Alright as expected, this is getting some attention (when money is inolved emotions apparently roll) Creating a "target list" wasn't my intention - but then again, how should I reveal my quick research without showing the data? I would like to know what percentage of users are doing this and how the community sees this. Should I create a more comprehensive list so users don't feel "targeted"?

Promoting this post to put more fuel into the fire 😅