This is not about self-voting though. This has been discussed many times before and there's actually no right or wrong. Steemit even encourage you to upvote your own posts as the default settings are to upvote your post when you publish a new article.
I personally recommend self-voting. Especially if you're anything but a heavily invested whale or dolphin. That's literally the only way you can make sure that you'll earn something.
However, I do not recommend self-voting comments and articles if you're a whale, as that will rape the reward pool. We've seen this many times too, and this still occurs.
I never upvote my own comments but I always upvote my own articles. I also try to upvote my articles after 30 minutes, so it will benefit the earlier curators a little bit more.
If one took away votes on comments, the reward pool would be raped by other means. By poor quality articles being published and so on. - Which we already can see today.
So I think it comes down to people's mindsets. People are "in it to win it", but many of them are having short term goals and are being selfish. - And I truly believe that such behaviour will destroy Steemit.
Thanks for the explanation. I'm sure that in time those that are developing the platform will listen to feedback and respond. Nobody wants to see it fail and even those whales that are greedy would prefer to play a fairer game and reap some rewards than destroy their own golden goose.
Personally I'm hoping that the platform will develop and improve over time offering an improved user experience as well as a fairer system. Don't get me wrong, it's already excellent, but I think it will continue to get better.
I am sure Steemit will improve. I would just prefer if changes happened more often, as it seems that we're waiting for a fix or a solution to many things for a long period of time before we see any response.