This is kind of right but mostly wrong, IMO.
Minnow spam isn't "reward pool rape". Frankly that is just a buzzword people use now to mean they feel they deserve that money.
Spam causes a problem on the resources required to run the blockchain. It has very little to do with depleting the rewards. As a witness when I see users spamming bloat into the blockchain, I often make it harder for them to continue.
Minnows self voting, or whales, doesn't bother me, and probably many others, very much. But like I said before anyone has to right to do as they please with their power. Which includes downvote, upvote, or spam. Just because you have the right to do it doesn't mean I don't have the right to attack it.
That's another thing I believe the original anti-self-commentor failed to mention is that we only have so many votes per-day, which is part of the genius of Steemit, if there was no limit, then the whales would all be trillionaires!
Right, I fully understand we have a limited amount of votes per day, same as there is a limited amount of Steem that goes into the reward pool each day. When I look at your comment history I can see you upvote every comment you do, and believe me some dolphin or whale is going to notice you doing it one day and they would go after you. Since it is your right to upvote yourself(you are operating under the rules in this system) and it is their right to downvote you(which is also them operating under the rules in this system).
The only reason I am trying to alert you to this is because I did the same thing and rented steempower. I upvoted myself a ton 8 months ago. Then one day I woke up to someone 80,000 steempower making all my comments/posts go down to 0. There are a lot of tools out there that show who self votes and stuff like that.
I am not telling you what to do or what not to do. I am saying that those rewards you are giving yourself are not infinite, that it takes it out of the reward pool when you do that. Whales doing it is a much bigger problem because other whales need to get involved to nuke the rewards and stop that behavior.
Like I said, the day that happens, is the day I power-down and leave, because there are much bigger fish here on Steemit up-voting themselves thousands of dollars per day, in plain sight mind you, so they should be going after them, or just get rid of self-voting altogether.
I think it's more of a community cultural issue. If we allow spamming to be profitable, the sort of user we'll attract are parasitic spammers. If we attract enough of those they'll bury quality content, waste network resources, and eventually drain rewards and drive investors away.