I don't think you even have to talk about the selfish motives for self upvoting when that's what the curation rewards are for. Not only that, this also means you get some of that as well, on top of the reward you assign to yourself.
While there may be no way to stop people using sock puppets to hide their self voting, there is no reason why it should be easy to do, either, because it is antisocial. As ilya says, generosity is a key attribute that distinguishes this platform, before we even get to issues about how in no other field of human endeavour is self-assessment considered valid information without, at minimum, and inclement upon, the assessment of others.
Try running this platform without financial incentives. That is why people are here. We can all pretend that it's the quality content that drives it, or should drive it, but, as I have already addressed, people don't normally pay for online content, so why should people invest in Steem Power? No one has answered this point.
I've noticed a good number of these commentators have not invested in their own accounts. Why? And that's a really BIG question.
Expecting others to invest in Steem Power and vote for them whilst not investing in their own accounts is rather troubling, don't you think?
It's hardly polite or altruistic.
I have addressed your false dichotomy about self voting being a valid mechanism for determining the distribution in my previous reply to your comment. The Steem consensus logic is designed to reward your upvotes to other people through curation rewards. So you are being misleading and deceptive by failing to mention this.
"self voting being a valid mechanism for determining the distribution"
I simply did not say this.
Please, you have made a claim, substantiate it.
The corollary of 'Why would people invest in steem when they can't vote their own stuff' is its logical inverse in question form of the statement 'People only invest in steem to make money'. Is it not?
Just because you didn't say something didn't mean you didn't imply it logically.
And in response to that, I would suggest you look at users like @berniesanders and @r4fken who put a lot of money into steem so they could stop people doing things they think are lame. Right there, is a motivation for investing in steem that I already have stated, and I will not state again in my dialogue with you.
I will instead point out that if it were not for such a non-monetary motivation I would not be attempting to show you the folly of your thinking, I am doing this both for your benefit and for the benefit of the community to show that my arguments and justifications are far broader than any weak attempt to destroy them can be, and that you can't just shut down a discussion because you disagree with it.
This is precisely one of the beautiful features of this platform. There is nobody between me and you, this is peer to peer, and all (most) participants desire the record to be kept faithfully. This even starts to dig at fundamental architectural elements of blockchains as a whole.
"and that you can't just shut down a discussion because you disagree with it."
Again you are accusing me of something. It seem that I am having to defend myself against things that you simply think up. When did I try to shut down the discussion?
I have legitimate concerns and I have a right to air them. If you choose not to address them then so be it.
I wish you a good night or day, depending on where you are.
"The Steem consensus logic is designed to reward your upvotes to other people through curation rewards. So you are being misleading and deceptive by failing to mention this."
You have absolutely no right to call me misleading!
Since when did what Steem consensus logic is designed to do have any bearing on the points I made?
Again, you are trying to introduce false points to try and deflect away from what I actually said.
You were trying to close this debate without addressing this, which precisely is misleading.
Anyone can now also read through your comments on your profile and judge for themselves whether you were in fact misleading and in this assertion I am mistaken, or not.
It has a hell of a lot of bearing because your wonderous self-upvotes are part of the logic as it stands right now, which is why this is even being discussed.
"You were trying to close this debate without addressing this, which precisely is misleading.
Anyone can now also read through your comments on your profile and judge for themselves whether you were in fact misleading and in this assertion I am mistaken, or not.
It has a hell of a lot of bearing because your wonderous self-upvotes are part of the logic as it stands right now, which is why this is even being discussed."
Well, actually, I have addressed how and when I vote in some of my previous post and comments. I was recently complaining that there were no suitable posts to vote on.
Again, you seem to be attacking me rather than my argument.
Perhaps it would help to inform you that, as my profile shows, I have been here since the end of August last year. I don't mean by that 'and so I am more qualified than you' at all, and there's no intention of that being any kind of pissing contest either.
I have been also dealing with the same interface, with the same mechanisms, and it was since HF19 as I started to see self-upvoted comments, which by the way almost never happened before, except as like on my post about @timcliff's response to my raising an issue about the vote slider for minnows, you can see myself and @pfunk discuss this directly in our comment thread, as @pfunk upvoted his post in order to give it more visibliity.
This justification is a lot more robust than any involving motivations to invest in the platform. However, it is wrong, because in doing this, he made the assumption that I needed to have it elevated. But it may well even simply be that because he and I have not had extensive direct interactions with each other, he was not aware of the fact that I read every single comment and I then give my opinion in the form of upvotes, their omission, or a comment in response that attempts to address the points in the comment.
You are all getting to know me better in this process, which is precisely what I believe I have to do to gain the edge over the largely self contained circles in the higher levels of the Witness schedule, in order to move upwards. The people, everyone, even myself, have a need of guidance, and I believe that this is a proper attribute of someone with the trust and power invested in them that is required of a Witness.
I believe that to some extent, this 'circle jerk' 'voting for only friends' thing you talk about, equally applies to the witness schedule, to some extent, and this is also not a net benefit to the community. The witnesses should be held as accountable as a minister of government. They can't be using their inside knowledge and power to enrich themselves in the domain they are supposed to be governing for the benefit of others. Witnesses get paid a lot and witnesses should be the consensually agreed most level headed, and caring people in the community.