hm i was considering buying steem to give more visibility to my posts, but if you want to remove self-vote then this incentive to buy steem disappears...and the whole attention economy collapses.
Very good point. It is certainly something that needs to be considered however if you read further I suggested an alternative would be to exclude curation rewards for self voting.
As for the numerous people abusing the system I agree something needs to be done about it but there is no simple solution just as with this issue.
yeah removing the curation rewards would be fair, but I don't think it can be done. The user can simply delegate or move his steem power to a proxy and self vote with the added curation rewards that way.
He/she could but it would be better than what we have now. Not everyone would do it and more of the curation would go to other people.