@financialcritic You're twisting the numbers. You self-voted 60% of all the money you gave out. It's not about annual return.
Clarification for you and everyone else:
It's not really abuse, it's just not smart to do as self-votes add no value to the platform. It's good for people to realize this while the protocol still allows it. Until the problem within the protocol is resolved, the only chance to success is if everyone stops self-voting as much as possible.
Self-voting doesn't give you a better return, it just gives you more tokens while decreasing the value of the tokens. When you withhold payouts from content creators they might produce less quality content, leave the platform or worse; spread negative reviews about SteemIt and scare away many users and potential investors. The best promotion for SteemIt is Word-of-Mouth Advertising, so the stupidest thing to do while investing in something is doing things that hurt your investment.
Annual return is everything
The money I earned was chicken shit compared to what I could have if I was really out to abuse the system. You are still missing the point that I could have earned $1k to $2k in that 1 month period by self upvoting if I wanted to abuse the system.
Nope it's irrelevant.
It's only about the relative amount of money assigned by self-votes. It doesn't matter if you assigned 6 cents out of 10 cents or 6 million out of 10 million, it's the same percentage.
The way the system works is that when you don't use your voting power, the $ amount that others can assign out of the reward pool increases, when you do vote, their $ amount decreases. So when someone does vote, it's highly preferred to add value to the network (by either voting on high quality (preferably even under-rewarded) content or flagging bad content).
This is no personal attack against anyone that self-votes, because the system allows it. It's just to raise awareness that the system is flawed and that self-votes aren't beneficial to the platform in any way. The sooner the flaw gets fixed the better, but until then, the only thing we can do as users is change our behavior.
I agree with you that self-votes generally hurt the system and the system is flawed. My point is that the majority of the hurt is being caused by bots and people not on your radar.
Also, annual return is extremely important in the crypto world. Everyone is claiming to be a day trader or investor in crypto. They are absolutely looking for a return. You should try to understand that the return drives the motivation of a lot of people on here...you don't have to agree with the behavior, just asking you to recognize it's importance.
None of that will help so long as a vote is not equal to someone elses.