Thanks for being so responsive and "politely" trying to educate.
Maybe it helps move fast forward on the conversation if I cut to the point here.
I am not new to Hive, and I am quite active already for years. I have many accounts, everyone should know that, because its kind of obvious from the chain data... I reserved this account for Hive Engine tokens in order to separate how voting works.
In my view, upvoting own comments or posts, has only one fair reason to exist. Which is to "fight" someone else's downvote. Because voting its considered the primary tool for governance on this chain.
And now its 50/50% (curation/author) but it was not always like that. And maybe it helps explain my point if you think about when it was not 50/50%, as in those times, people would have more incentive to upvote their own things. Although, "feeding" all the account power into voting our own posts (or comments, for that matter they are the same), its sort of considered a chain attack, as an account doing such, is trying to avoid the curation mechanism (which involves the entire chain stake being able to decide who should get the X% of the rewards pool), which is the primary method or tool to protect the chain stake evolution.
Why? well, because now your stake (in situation above) is creating an imbalance, by being deposited on your own stake. I am not saying it should not be possible, it clearly is, but its seen as an imbalance because you would be using your own stake to increase how much rewards you get from the rewards pool, and the community only way to say "I agree or Not" is by downvoting that upvote weight (nullifying that imbalance).
Lets use an example to extrapolate...
If I own 50% of the chain stake, I can always take up to 50% of the rewards pool, And in principle, I can control the chain stake forever unless a hard fork happens and something is changed by the witnesses. Because on this attack I can keep creating posts/comments and upvote them with my weight which has equal weight to the rest of the community downvote combined together. Hence a possible attack vector and why is not seen as a "good thing".
And then you may ask, "then why is it possible, why is this feature not removed?" Right?
There are other things why the ability to vote for your own things exist/is possible, and other times where these are seen NOT as a good practice, such as for example, the leadership or influencial value to others. People not always understand and if they see something they are just going to copy it, and often don't want to understand the "why", and because becomes appealing to receive more rewards, they enter into a rabbit hole of viciously trying to get more and more rewards, because they can.
Its true they can, but its also true that others can deny that with downvotes. And people associate downvoting as something negative, but in fact, voting is the primary tool to protect this chain (upvoting or downvoting). Lets get to another example here, and say someone posts/comments that the community voted for, lets say, for argumenta sake, was voted as 1 dollar value by the community (and not yet self voted by the owner of that post), and then someone else comes and downvotes that post/comment to zero, then upvoting your own post/comment in this situation is seen as a good reason to exist, Why? Because that's a right for the posting account to reverse, nullify the action from the downvote wich might not have the community consensus (as in zero value post) and therefore allows an account to express the sentiment about that action. So, in this case the selfvote has a total different meaning, which is seen as a tool to fight what the community did not agree with, which was that the post/comment was not worth 0, but instead 1 dollar.
Because of all these nuances, is very hard to explain the why's or why's not's of everything...
I am not super worried, I am an educator too. Just trying to understand why you do it for so long, and in you case you were probably never downvoted because you don't have a huge stake or spam continuously on chain, or show your understanding about what you are doing such things. Just like I mentioned before, the atitude might not worry the bigger stakers hence you are not seen as a potential attacker. Although it can rapidly change depending on what people do.
Anyhow, way to big comment. Will give you the chance to digest and respond if you want. I appreciate you maintaining the very polite and honest view. And yes, I have went through a lot of your posts before we started this conversation. Because I didn't want to bias you in the first place, and get your plain opinion on things. Which I believe you did. So, I will not be worried as a staker about you upvoting your own posts, even if I would prefer you not doing so, mostly because of the influence aspect towards others.
But as anyone on chain, people may change. And I or you, might/can change. So, we should keep adapting.
Cheers