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This is the same response I got from randowhale, but I still feel like preventing it would deter a large portion of the abuse, and might encourage people to act in an ethical manner.

I feel as though having the image of a goat licking its own backside amid your own comments on a serious post is enough to deter my use of a service to self vote. Perhaps if all the voting bots had similar disincentives to self voting we'd see a change in that trend?

One of the reasons we need to split the post rewards 50/50 between author and curators, like it was more than 12 months ago. The only way to end the self upvote, is to give people a more lucrative way to spend their voting power.

But will creating posts be worth it then? I personally would love a 50/50 split but I can imagine many problems with it...

Let's talk about them then :)
Most people are going to care more about a total than a percentage. It only needs to increase the payouts by 34% in order to make the change of net benefit to the author.
If steemers are madly upvoting anything they think will be popular, instead of hoarding their vp for self upvotes, a 34% increase is far from ambitious.

True that.

This could trigger an even bigger flocking on the top 1% because everyone wants big curation rewards (and educating them on the system seems futile). But that will solve itself over time I guess...

I think you have convinced me.