Sorry about your loss. And sorry about those DVs that led to this post.
Now normally my rule is that I ONLY SELF VOTE on my posts when someone downvotes them without reason. However, #VYB has provided a compelling reason to not do that. I'll hold off.
We will be posting soon with some clarifications about the community standards that will govern VYB and Verify Your Brain.
Regarding self-votes, we acknowledge that they have their place and that there are valid reasons for doing so (that's why we gave 10% 'credit' for self-voted posts when calculating the airdrop percentages, instead of zero). Your rationale above is one of those.
With Verify Your Brain and VYB, anyone who wants to self-vote on a given post can simply combine the tags #pob with #no-vyb for that particular post. That way, the post will earn POB tokens just like normal, won't earn VYB tokens, but also won't be called out by the VYB anti-abuse team.
In short, folks will be free to self-vote, it's just that they won't be free to self-vote AND earn VYB tokens at the same time.
I will keep that in mind. In reality since I have powered down most of my hive power my own up vote is not worth enough for it to be significant. I will stop powering down after next week and then work on building back up. I have continued to slowly power up POB and some other layer 2 tokens.