Small victories are victories. Period. There's a lot I haven't learned about Steemit culture and behaviors (and some I'm likely better off not knowing) yet I like to see people who are not creating original content get "taken down a notch or two, or ten..."
For awhile I upvoted all of my own posts. My vote is only worth 0.01 - 0.02 so it wasn't abusive in my opinion. There was questioning about the motivation and effectiveness though. My thought was that maybe an upvote while the post was newly published would give it a little boost, and that my relatively weak voting power wouldn't offend anyone. I hoped I'd gain Steem Power more quickly and be able to give others more valuable upvotes. I gave it up because voting on my own posts didn't seem to help my content get noticed or earn more. So I'd rather give what power I do have to people posting awesome content.
Yes, Upvoting other people seems better in my opinion.
It's not only praise for the person but a chance to curate for yourself.
While with my posts if I self vote I may not even get curation :^)
That's the absurd/funny part though. Good people like you are considering social implications of things like self-voting and then there's the people posting pandemonium and throwing money to support it :|
So long as buying votes is profitable I think my ethics are going to be to use SBD for that instead of upvoting myself directly.