I don't think it's a problem. Larimer even discussed the issue of self-voting quite extensively, and basically, it's just about optimising the distribution of new tokens. It wouldn't matter whether people self vote or not, in my view, because on average, based on the relative levels of posting activity and voting, pretty much, though unevenly, distributes a roughly stable amount of new tokens in a given time period.
It's best to think of self-voting as simply claiming interest payments. You can't make more than a certain amount this way. Writing the content that gets a lot of votes will always be more profitable.
I agree that writing posts will be more profitable, but not necessarily writing comments. For people like me, who comment a lot without writing our own posts (well up until recently at least), it's worse.
Plus, really what I dislike the most about it is not even how much money people make from it in relation to how much others make, but rather how it looks. The psychological aspect of seeing particular users hand themselves 5 bucks for commenting "OK" back to someone etc.
I dunno, you should keep watching your curation rewards, they should still be ticking up even though you are only mainly a commentator. I don't think there is a one-size-fits-all rule about when it is etiquette to self vote, but if you aren't writing posts, you are missing out on a share of the steem that more stupid people are happily taking.
It may be that HF20 includes a ban on self voting. I can see this shaping up to be a HF worthy issue. Essentially, the self voters will force those like you to self vote, or watch them get the steem instead. This is an unacceptable situation and I think it will need to be remedied.
However, the increased decay rate of voting may ameliorate this, as the self voters spend their voting power down to the 20s and lower, and your received votes will probably be relatively worth more. So the steemit devs did consider this and it was included in HF19, and may be sufficient a remedy. The honeymoon will be brief for self voters, I think.
So it could go two ways, I won't say with certainty which way it is going to go.
Good points. For me though the rewards come anyhow through encouragement votes most times that I use the eSteem or ChainnBB apps to comment, but that's not what I'd consider "normal" within the network.
I have started to adopt a new policy where I only put ~10% votes on most posts/comments that I like, and reserve the full power for people like you, and others, who I have sympathy with. I think this will become a convention post HF19, because of the vote decay rate.
Hey thanks =) I'm doing something similar. Trying to adjust my % as few times as I can. I've noticed about 20-30% is best for me mostly, but I'm keeping it 10% as I'm letting my account recover.
I've been going at 20%, it's only slightly less than 25%, but gets you 50 a day instead of 40.
I do like dropping the 100%-ers from time to time though :)
I'm only dropping 1% for my main 'like' votes until my VP regenerates, but then I see stuff I need to up 100% and I'm not making much progress getting it back :/