I see what you're saying, but I suspect most self-voters are actually being rational agents, but with short-term preferences (possibly shorter than they intend!). If the economic incentives change so that some pretty minimal curation activity nets them more profit than voting on their own low-effort content, then the abuse will decline and/or their content improves to make it more profitable for them to self-vote on it. The network wins.
Do you think the abuse should be dealt with in some other way?
<"...you get 25% of what your vote was, the other 75% goes to the author, so if your vote is $0.12 then you get back $0.03 for voting."
This is much different that what I understood. I thought that curators received 25% of the post value, so that the curator in your example would receive $25.
I am now alarmed that it is my comments that produce over 2/3 of my rewards LOL
I am not following, I guess. If curation is allotted 25% of the total rewards for a post, and (in the example you gave) where only one vote applies, then for a $100 post, that vote would seem to be worth $25, regardless of timing.
In a real world situation, where there are likely to be many votes on a $100 post, then the timing of the vote would clearly change that, due to the allocation you mention.
Right?
The problem with flagging is that there is a pretty severe opportunity cost.
A person flagging is granting rewards to all posts which have active votes instead of using their vote to gain rewards. Yes, some people will do it (perhaps gaining social capital) which is good, but if we simply consider rewards, and not reputations, I think this action actually isn't economically rational.