It's pretty simple for me. I upvote posts I like; abstain from those I don't; and downvote (rarely) when I think a post is harmful to the community.
Am I to understand that you think upvoting your own post or reply is considered a "bad" thing?
Edit: I am upvoting my own post!
It is your personal decision. Yet consider if every vote you made was worth $100 because you had accumulated sufficient steem power for that to be the case. You could give yourself $100 just by saying "Have a nice day."
If I pump 50000$ into the system, would you really begrudge me the 40 cents I give back to myself if I upvote my own post or comment?
I don't begrudge you anything. When I first came to steemit I watched tutorials that recommended voting on your own comments and such to improve visibility and to increase how fast you gained steem power. I thought "Great" and I did that for awhile until I learned we have a voting % which decreases with each vote. So by voting on myself I greatly decreased the chance of me being able to improve steemit for everyone and thus by improving them also create a potential force multiplier for myself. I'd rather have 10 people who were uplifted over time by me and others voting on me, than me wasting my voting power on myself.
That is the only reason I stopped. I was diluting my vote so it was not very valuable over all by voting on myself. I post A LOT so voting on myself is a very bad thing. That is ME personally. What you do should fit you, your situation, and what your goals are.
And in my example I also did not say anything about 40 cents. I said $100. If you got $100 from yourself for that post you just did to me, I'd not begrudge you that... it's your vote. Yet I would think you were kind of a dick. Am I going to think that for 40 cents? It won't even be a glimmer in my mind. Yet what I think should not really matter, it should be what you want, and what your goals are. If your goals are to uplift many others and you post a lot then you might consider how dilution may be impacting your goals.
Oh also... you are not really giving back to yourself. BACK implies it was yours. When I vote I do not see how much steem power I have decreasing, so it is not taking anything from me. Thus, there is nothing to give back.
It's a bad thing that no one can prevent, so it becomes the most rational option.
Unless you're a bot (or manually upvote a lot), in which case you might lose rewards by upvoting your own post.
How would you lose rewards? Even when you submit a blog post, there is a switch to turn on upvote when submitting. I htink it used to be on by default.
By losing rewards I meant losing potential rewards - which is really the same. Just like many others, I'm at a point right now where upvoting any content manually will be a loss since it'll lower my voting power. I just can't be as good as my bot at predicting content that'll become popular, even if I read or create content myself. I wrote a quick post about it yesterday if you're interested.