Unfortunately I think all the bots for buying self votes may have something very different to say about self voting.
Many (all?) of those bots that they pay to upvote their own post can also be directed to upvote other posts/comments too, ones that are not by the ones paying, but that doesn't happen much as there is a rapidly growing impatience to be a bigger fish (dolphin, or whale) the bots mostly upvote the post/comment creator that pays.
This is not good for Steemit as it could be rewarding content that really isn't worth the rewards it is receiving as could be evidenced by a lack of non bot votes on those comments/posts.
It seems the way Steemit is heading is to be a community where more than 25% will be bots deigned to encourage automatic (content not even read or understood) upvoting for member of certain groups or 'support groups' at the expense of the other community members not in the 'support group' but still maybe creating content that deserves to be be seen and upvoted.
Why do these bots target the redfish and minnows...maybe because many are too impatient to wait their turn, so they want to self vote to glory, unfortunately the upvote bots are encouraging this more and more at the expense of the rest of the Steemit community.
In time maybe non users of upvote bots will also unite and just not upvote/follow/ users of the bots, there are only so many upvotes a bot can make, and take from the reward pool each reward period.
I like the idea of NOT voting for anyone who BUYS a vote. Buying votes just goes against everything Steemit is supposed to striving for. I would be totally happy if bots were outlawed.
I seriously doubt that bots being outlawed will happen, there are too many dolphins and whales running them....and guess who still has most control over steemit.
Not only that, but how can the system distinguish between a live person and a bot? After all, it is all just electronic signals.
You actually have a great point here, thanks for taking the time to write it.
I didn't actually realize but my project with @treeplanter would exactly allow for self votes, as it's kind of like @randowhale
Thanks to your insight here (and not thanks to my own blindness!) I discussed it with the person in charge of it and we decided to add a note to the automatic comment to encourage people not to use it to self vote themselves. In time we might disallow it entirely but for the moment we will allow users to decide, as it is in steemit now, and see what happens.
You can read the statement here.