Some built in factors even encourage this, e.g. you are allowed to upvote yourself (which makes no sense at all from a community point of view,
Unless your source of steem or steem power comes directly from the reward pool, self-voting makes a lot of sense. The reason is that when you invest by buying steempower, it gives the power to boost the visibility of your post. Why would you invest large amounts of steempower to boost the visibility of someone else's post? This is essentially an advertising model tied to also having the ability to distribute rewards. The solution to this problem is quite simply.
So a summary:
How model is best used: You buy SP which you use for boosting the visibility of your post.
The problem: You also have the ability to distribute rewards on boosted posts.
Solution: quite obvious !
Ps: Very well detailed writting. Not sure why you went much into Steemit while your title seems to indicate EOS. Although you gave an explanation; it wasn't at all justifiable... ..
Hi, thanks for that detailed reply! This article in the series (there are several) looks at Steem as it's a proof of concept for EOS.
As regards self-upvoting, i absolutely agree, that it makes sense from a financial angle, but it does not make sense from a social network standpoint, because it's not an real valuation of the content quality. Here the monetary aspect counteracts the quality aspect of the content.