Thanks for opening up this topic, @pennsif, it seems like there are a lot of opinions on both sides, so let me share what I think:
I've never had a problem beating my own drum, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm generally the first one to upvote my posts. I just feel it's a way of showing appreciation to my own product, raising it from the absolute $0.00 to a modest $0.05.
However, there is another related issue that bothers me a lot more: it's the one regarding unused votes. Like in the past week, when I was so occupied with other things that I barely had the chance to look around on Steemit, never mind posting articles. My ten or so votes I'd normally give out a day went down the drain unused. That is about fifty cents a day (counting $3.50 in a week of inactivity) that I could have distributed to many valuable steemians... Now THIS it seems to make a much bigger bigger difference than the five cents of koodo-points I like reward myself with for a post I consider satisfactory.