Or, it's a way for people to build up steem capital, which is good for steemit.
Let's say I'm a new user (I am) and I don't want to create content for free. So I start and pay for 30 days of delegated SP, say, a $30 upvote.
With my full value 10 upvotes, every day I would:
write two good articles a day and upvote myself (I haven't smashed the math but I think 2 self upvotes a day has the investment break even, maybe upvote a comment to make a little profit...which would increase my SP...which increases the value of my upvote, which makes me more interested in helping people out with my upvote).
upvote https://steemit.com/steemit/@daniel.dalo/centaurus-steemit-lottery-142-2017115t211421608z every day to help get the game going/grow the popularity of his project. Because fun.
upvote 6-7 other steemians articles/posts that I like.
These $30 upvotes put all the receivers (including myself) into higher standing with greater chance to attract followers and votes and income. This has me want to continue to create more content. This has daniel.dalo want to continue/increase his participation. This makes new authors smile like crazy when they see a $30 upvote.
This is only good for steemit. Yes I can see it would be bad to self invest to upvote 10+ times on spam comments.
If someone with more SP downvotes me because they think self voting is bad, then A. my investment would be lost and B. I'd quit steemit because a platform where a bully can kill your account/rep/earnings will never mass adopt. I shouldn't even be here because that happened to my friend who had built her account up to $100+/post and some whale smashed her account down to a -1 rep. Fuck that....but here I am because with some fixes I hope will be implemented, steemit might be awesome in the future.
Ouch. I did the math. The investment to get a $30 upvote is like $6,000+, and even if did all 10 full power upvotes on oneself, one would take a serious loss.
The loss might be worth it if putting out good content and building rep and followers and upvotes, etc.