The thought process behind the development of steembay was far away from desperate. We did not want to take a fee for auctioning, but make it free to use. The selfvoting serves two points: financing it ofc, while we never voted with the steembay stack for our own accounts but more important to influence the overview of the bidding process.
We are online now since Nov. 17 and NOT ONCE anybody complained about us "selfvoting". We had completely different plans (as already explained we wanted to upvote every auction), but the support we got was minimal also the SBD spike harmed our initial plans a lot.
Once more from a game theory perspective: I would invite a million businesses trying to provide services while storing in their account 1000 $ instead of trying to make it "feel" more "fair" for those who never invested a dime.
Selfvoting does not really harm the blockchain, but it slows down a lot healthy growth. "Policing it" or as personz is putting it "making a statement" can be a short term approach. But people will always find a way to act the most opportunistic possible. Thus any way they try to "teach manners" will lead into people finding ways around it followed by even stricter arbitrary lines or more complex algorithms. In the end there is a lot of power and influence centered around a small group able to change rules at a whim. I oppose this approach as I did with gilds and voting trails, as I do with bidbots and vote selling.
Don't get me wrong... I LOVE flags, even if I don't use them often.
Organizing votes OR flags is simply another way of giving away responsibility. We loose and miss a huge opportunity that could have been realised by blockchain technology. But probably that is just me fooling around with my thoughts and utopias of a new society.