I've only been a part of the Steemit community for a short while, but every-so-often I see a post about "why you shouldn't upvote your own post" or "why upvoting your own post is good for the community as a whole."
First off, I'd like to mention that the Steemit website and platform is in beta according to the top left. There is no official way of tracking the progress of updates or the future thinking of the developers behind the platform.
On to my question though.. If the developers saw the upvoting of your own post as a "bad thing" or as a way to "hack the system" then why would they intentionally check the "Upvote post" box as a default for each new post?
I saw a post a bit ago about how the White Paper states that bad behavior with upvoting doesn't necessarily hurt the community and instead promotes the spread of Steem. It seems the developers would prefer you to upvote your own posts and when you first start out on the platform, this is what you are conditioned to do.
I do get both sides, and in the end it usually ends up being a personal moral choice of. wether you give yourself more so you can give away more... vs giving away more and having little for yourself almost
The default upvoting is only for new users. Honestly, not sure why... not like your vote is worth much at that point.
Eventually it goes away. Personally though, I think people seriously overthink the self-voting thing. If all you ever do is self-vote, that's a problem. But once or twice a day should be fine (more than that and arguably your voting power drops too much) and then you can use your other votes for other people's quality content.
The major disapproval of self upvoting is when people give themselves votes which truly represent a big value. Upvoting yourself when your vote is worth 0.01...yeah not a big deal. But theres a lot of people who do it with votes worth 10-30$ easily...thats wrong