As I understand it if you approach it selfishly like this then your posts are probably not going to be very good, which means your ability to profit from such an approach will be significantly limited. A super massive beast of a whale might profit a lot from upvoting their own posts, and people would flock to them resentfully so they can gain some share in it, but they're actually limiting their own profits by doing so. We don't care if someones rich, we'll happily make them even richer, what we hate is the extent we think someones both rich and selfish. So if a moon-sized whale wants to profit only with selfishness, they're really only hurting their profits. What if being lovable was more profitable?

(Why good leaders make you feel safe | Simon Sinek )

If your posts are good AND you only voted for yourself, well then everyone still wins and it really doesn't all that matter if you only voted for yourself. But obviously it's far more likely that someone who's trying to approach it this way and just "pay themselves" to earn rather than developing an audience and posting good content to earn, is probably not going to be that concerned with the quality of their posts.

If you only vote for yourself then you also miss out on profiting by giving your vote to another and sharing the pot. Even if really big whales were to post this way people would piggyback off them, it would be a rather unsightly relationship of teeny tiny parasites attaching to self-centred blubberous mass, but it would still nevertheless be a symbiotic one. Am I missing something?

It seems to me the best way to design a system like a social network is to model it very much on nature, where even the most ugly and to us the most monstrous, do serve a purpose and play a very important part in the system.

Steemit seems to have done a wonderful job in that regard, I don't know how consciously this was, to kind of build a system where it literally insensitivities selfishness to express itself in the most productive positive forms; selflessness, empathy and helping others, while heavily disincentiving self-centredness money making approaches, impoliteness, trolling. But to my mind the most interesting things is that if someone does play selfish with their votes in spite of the disincentives, they don't cause the system to topple over because it causes a natural counter reaction to even it out. I don't know, I just think that's really clever and particularly special.

(Simon Sinek: Why Leaders Eat Last)