If someone spends $10,000 on a POW mining rig and receives a proportional amount of the block rewards for that coin, no one complains.
If someone spends $10,000 on Steem Power and receives a proportional amount of the block rewards from Steem via self-voting, is that something we should complain about?
It's an interesting question. I asked someone about their thoughts on self-voting after I saw them doing a bit of it, and I really liked their reply.
I also liked Sean's thoughts on the topic.
There is nothing immoral about it, just a bit of a social stigma. I'm not concerned about that.
The goal of Steem is to reward quality content. You don't need to get votes from other people for some fairly fixed proportion of your SP to be paid on top in rewards.
If this wasn't the goal of steem, it would not have voting, or a forum, right?
ohhhhh. now that's a new way of thinking about this. seeing sean thoughts...
I think self voting leads to speculative bubbles and creates a ponzi ecosystem and will ultimately kill this community.
I am completely with @l0k1 when he writes "Could it not be very simply added, just one little if/then, that a user cannot vote on themselves?". I think this should be taken up immediately and voted on.
As @l0k1 pointed out correctly, this will affect the newcomers the most. I am new to Steemit, have zero fake accounts and don't have the energy to open one or bigger, maintain two accounts, and I am still on board this from the go. I think self voting is stupidity. Just ask a simple question, would anyone self vote if it was not incentive-ized.
We have created an incentive structure to prop up an inherently wasteful social activity and there lies the crux of my argument. Self voting harms the community and our relationship within it. This is about the larger picture and not any one personally.