At First, i Saw self vote as a bad thing, but with time, i noticed that It is a 2 Edge sword.
You write an good post, but no one see It, and no one vote. Then is It really bad to self vote to get at least something back for you efforts? I dont think so.
The problem begins when the big sp holders do It all the time, no matter the quality of the article, but like you said, if there were no self votes, you could Just create another account, direct the sp to that account, and you would have the same effect with no shame. By the way, its easy to see that this already happen.
So, the existance of the self vote dont matter at all.
But here is something that need to be put on light: what is the objective of the user?
Short term or long term?
For short term, the self vote is a good Tool. You get a return on your investment for a Very low effort.
For long term, unless your have a really good content, self vote is the worst, because It Will put on the main page, the one that attract potential New big investors to steem (and the money to increase steem price), Will be Full of shit.
So here is my suggestion If you are in Steem as a long term investor: divide you daily vp in 3. 1/3 Go to your self vote, 1/3 Go to vote good quality posts, and the last 1/3 Go to flag shit content.
That way you can get your roi, and at the same time improve the front page of steemit, bringing in more and more users.
Thanks for your comment!
Your split is very interesting. 1/3 for Flagging seems to be a lot. But maybe if more people did that much flagging then we wouldn't have such a rubbish trending page.