I couldn't be certain, but it used to be the case that you couldn't assign any reward at all (minimum is 1 cent) until you had built up about 300+ SP, so, no, it's not likely any kind of serious road to minnowhood or dolphinhood... However, for the higher levels, yes, it will build SP faster. But the cost is going to be a lot of people who realise they can just post rubbish, vote for themselves, and not actually read, evaluate, or give any genuine opinion about any other posts, nor will they feel so motivated to win votes by producing desirable quality.
This will bring new users, but they will add nothing of value to the network.
Self value voting is worth much less than getting more varied votes from many users of increased value and diversity which will win out.
It is, but winning those votes usually takes some reasonable amount of effort and talent.
I guess a justification for leaving it as it is, and not preventing it in the consensus code, is that it gives the talentless, lazy people an opportunity. I just don't think this is sending the right message to the world-full-of-scammers-and-lazyasses to get off their asses and do some real work (not 'get a real jerb', as BS likes to hurl at everyone when he gets hoity toity).
Well, I guess we'll see what happens. I think that the longer people are in here, the more they respect the common etiquette of the culture, but as the rewards draw new users, I think we can expect to start to see a spam problem. And then probably someone like @smooth or @abit will start using whale power to precisely neutralise them. And then we will have HF20.
I will post a bet on this if anyone wants to keep a book!
Understood and no being able to vote for yourself would force you to vote for others. So we shall explore this idea more as a community and see what we all think of it.
That is precisely what I am putting this out there for, to get a discussion going to untangle all the threads and see what we really have.