It's literally the other way around. Self-voting removes value from SteemIt. Every single cent you aren't spending on good content creators is lowering the overall value.
Curators can make more money by finding undervalued posts (30 minutes+ old) and resteeming it or otherwise promoting it. That's a win-win, because the content creator is happy, the curator is happy and the curator didn't remove value from the platform.
The value of STEEM will rise anyway if you never self-vote, in fact it probably will rise even more in the long-term!
Self-voting is so terrible for the platform that there should be a hard fork to disincentivize it on the blockchain level.
You assume that the people who are self voting aren't "good content creators". If indeed they are not, then we can counteract their overindulgent self-voting by flagging (and people are already starting to do that, myself included).
Banning self-voting can only undermine the price of Steem. For instance, I have personally purchased thousands of dollars of SP (and I know many others who have done the same) so that I can influence what content gets visibility on the Steem platform, INCLUDING ESPECIALLY MY OWN. I (and many others) would have NEVER purchased so much, much less held it for so long, if doing so didn't increase my ability to get more exposure for my own content.
What you are overlooking is that it's NOT the authors and curatiors that give Steem value. The authors and curators come here only becasue Steem HAS value, and Steem has value not because it's "earned" by posting and curating but becasue people like my are willing to BUY it with money and HOLD it. It has value because capital (money) is flowing into it. That money flows into it in large part becasue people who acquire and hold Steem have a greater likelihood gaining exposure for their own content. The more Steem one holds, the greater one's voice on the platform. If we only allow that voice to be heard when it speaks of others and not when it speaks of the Steem holder himself or herself, then Steem's value declines.
Were there no other way of dealing with inappropriate self-voting, then I would agree that the damage done to capital inflows by banning self-voting may be worth it. But when the problem is easily solved by other means (like flagging), banning self-voting will do nothing but limit capital inflow and thereby reduce the value of Steem. Lower Steem prices means inferior authors and curators.
Look around, friend, Steem is healthier than ever. New users are way up. The price of Steem is way up. Alex ranking is way up! Growth is exponential. Your panic over self-voting is completley unjustified and unneeded.
Here's the bottom line: Those who want to ban self-voting are mainly folks who seek to acquire Steem by posting and curating rather than by PURCHASE. But it's only the latter that gives Steem value. And folks who are willing to purchase Steem do so in large part becasue they can influence the exposure of their own content.
true... if you want influence buy/earn steem power that's it
it's the same as hashing power, you need to invest and have skin in the game
From the whitepaper:
Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
More from the whitepaper:
The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution.
The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people over-estimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people
gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.