I’m not sure how popular this post is going to be but I’m going to publish it anyway.
I’ve thought long and hard about this and I think being able to vote for yourself or across multiple accounts you own is a serious weakness of the Steemit Platform.
Unfortunately I don’t have data on the proportion of the total reward pool made up of self-votes but I imagine the amount is significant.
In my opinion, it represents a portion of the reward pool that is allocated in a completely inefficient way with no bearing on the quality of the content, only the steem power of the account. The formula for Steemit to move forward is a fair reward structure supporting quality account across a growing community of users.
Ring-fencing a large portion of the reward pool for self-voting will in my view slow down the progression of Steemit.
In addition to slowing progress, It is also completely open to abuse. Currently, having 10k of Steem Power will afford you 5/6 dollars for a single upvote. If you just invested in Steem for this purpose alone, you could make that investment back in a year by abusing the system. I know it is possible to get downvoted but you could easily hide posts in Steemit by not having followers and giving your posts obscure tags.
I just don’t see the logic in it and I’m concerned this will damage the integrity of Steemit. I think Hard Fork 19 will actually bring more attention to this issue as more people will see the benefit (first hand) of self-voting.
Any thoughts on this, @teemsteem.