Taking away the monetary reward for upvoting your own post will simply cause more people to look for ways to auto-swap upvotes by using bots, joining guilds, and creating secondary accounts.
Next, there's going to have to be another hard-fork to get rid of bots, or change the rules for bots, or flag people out of SteemIt for belonging to certain vote-swapping guilds, and having multiple accounts. (OH, WAIT!!! DAN LARIMER HAS MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS ?!?! BUT...)
This is the exact same problem we have gotten into with the Tax Code in the USA. Now, there are so many rules, only a person who's trained for a lifetime in tax law can even begin to understand how it all works.
You like to use SteemIt for philanthropy, blogging, and the curation of good content. Maybe I like to use SteemIt to provide an interest-bearing savings account to help me take care of myself and my family. Somebody else may like to use SteemIt to promote their YouTube channel about growing weed. Another person likes to spread the "gospel" of their religion using an online presence. Is your purpose for using SteemIt more "virtuous" than mine is, or anybody elses? It's a matter of judgement and opinion. Should one group of people be trying to control how other people decide to spend or save their own money? Do you have the right to tell me what is valuable and what is not valuable, and then implement new rules on my savings account - because I use it to accumulate money to feed my children, instead of giving it to content creators?
Final Thought: Why not let SteemIt be a place of many varied uses and interests, rather than a place where one group of people tries to control how another group of people decides to use a diverse and varied social media platform/blockchain/financial instrument. SteemIt is not just a place for Content Creators - it is a place for Content Creators, Programmers, casual web-surfers, financial investments, and 3-eyed Ravens. Why place more limits upon it? Why so serious? Let's not try to make the external world conform to our individual set of values - let's value freedom, for each individual to choose. (Extreme cases of "abuse" can be dealt with by the Whales on a case-by-case basis, as they have been doing all along.)
@stellabelle Do you remember why people are leaving places like FaceBook and YouTube to search out alternative social-media platforms? Is it because they have such good "rules" for keeping everybody in line? Is it because their rules are so "fair" to everyone? Is it because they allow everyone their own, self-deterministic freedom to speak about & do what they want to??? Has Dan Larimer designed a poorly put-together blockchain here?!?! Are you better at advising the Steem developers what their policies "should be," as opposed to what they are? Did HF19 "fix" everything? Did it make it worse? Is HF20 going to do a better job at fixing all these "problems" than the previous 19 attempts? I don't know - but I do see some huge "blind spots" in your persepective on what SteemIt is, and what SteemIt "should be."
Good post. Upvoted and Resteemed.