Unfortunately, we're treading on dangerous ground here, as I am aware of a mechanism potential to strip virtually ALL rewards from the rewards pool, so don't wish to further elucidate. This mechanism isn't profitable, which precludes it's employment absent non-financial motives, and makes it unlikely to develop organically.

You are not incorrect that these accounts are but minor players, although perhaps, given the 400% fewer votes potential after HF19, and the dramatic increase in self votes that has further decreased the available number of votes per post, their strategy pencils out as financially optimal.

The problem for them is that their strategy practically precludes growth, which is dependent on using votes to benefit others.

So, I'm not really in favor of 'shaming', as I see that regardless of SP holdings, those egregiously self voting are doing so against their self interest financially. They just fail to understand the dynamics of growth and how, for minnows, using their votes to reach out to others as they form a community is far more profitable over a given period of time than self votes, and how for whales, using their SP to strongly encourage quality content creators potentiates price appreciation in Steem, which provides capital gains far in excess of curation or author rewards.

It will take a very long time to extract sufficient rewards from the rewards pool to equate to the 20k% price appreciation that Steem attaining 1% of the price of BTC creates as capital gains, and tbqh, Steem's potential to surpass BTC due to the use case (Steemit) is quite robust.

That growth requires an equally robust delivery of vests to a diverse community of authors, which is demonstrably not happening, due to self votes and cliques (at least in part). It is difficult for those able to extract income now from rewards pool mining to forego that income (particularly while others continue to do so) in order to curate content on the seemingly fanciful speculation of Steemit's growth to rival Fakebook, and BTC.

The code being permissive of such rewards pool mining is an indication that such long term growth isn't the intention of Steemit devs and investors, which I find unfortunate, as I believe strongly that such growth is far more potential than might seem obvious initially.