I see nothing wrong with self voting. Everyone does it at some point. Whether regularly or sporadically, it happens.

I am much more concerned with plagiarism myself. The people copying the work of others and passing it off here as theirs without any attribution to the original creator.

Self voting only effects you and those that you interact with the rest of your upvotes (we only have so much voting power per 24 hours). Plagiarism hurts Steemit as a whole because services like Google just see it as another "illegal activities" site and doesn't bother indexing the great content that is made available here.

When I first got "serious" about Steemit, I upvoted everything I posted - comments and articles. I didn't care. Then I started making friends and wanting to share a bit with them and realized my voting power was nothing because I upvoted all of my content.

I stopped upvoting myself a while back and have had a mixed response from the community. Some articles or comments take off like wildfire while others that I thought would do well flounder in the sub $0.10 range. That is the nature of the beast though - others found value in that other content and showed their support for it.

In turn, I have been able to move up a bit in the Steem Power levels and can give just a little more to content creators that I feel deserve it.

I am not one of those people that pour over the history of an author, checking their self vote record, checking their paid promotions, etc. If I like the content they have right there in front of me, it gets an upvote. If I look at other content they have made available and I like it, I will upvote it as well and then follow them to show my support for what they do.

How they spend their voting power and time here on Steemit is their business. Mine is simply to show support for what I like and ignore what I don't. I think eventually the content that is not popular or is unwanted will weed itself out because most of the time those authors are only here for money. If they are not making money, they leave.

For proof of this just pay attention to categories you enjoy. Watch how much content, and by whom, is made available when the value of Steem and Steem Dollars is high. Then watch who is left and what is made available when the value is low. Those that are still here, producing content like the price doesn't matter are the ones I try to pay attention to over those that only come out when the value is up.

Those people that are here day in and day out are the ones that help make Steemit great.

Again, thank you for starting this thread and making yourself a potential lightning rod for controversy. Sometimes we need to step out of our comfort zones and just say what is on our minds and get the opinion of others. You have seen the response so far which is part of why Steemit is so cool.

Good people attract good people.