So here are the stats for your outgoing and incoming votes (by weight) over the past 100 days and mine. Personally someone up voting themselves with a few $1 (or less) votes (while abusive to many) is slightly abusive in nature but nowhere near as bad as the bigger guys doing it. Remember by weight means that if you upvote yourself 20x at 100% and someone else upvotes you 40x at 50% then they have given you between 49.897215469% of your votes by weight and you have given yourself 50.10278453% of your votes. You decide what you make of the numbers these provide though. I would prefer a few thousand minnows upvoting themselves, and distributing the rewards over a large population, over a single user getting that reward... personally
Your voting over the past 100 days
Breakdown of your income over 100 days
Btw, the calculation for finding the amount of voting done by weight is a little more complex then what I did (rough approximation) and is supposed to take into account the SP of the voters as well, I didn't in my hypothetical situation.
Thanks for the breakdown. I just don't know what to make of this ethically. On one hand I do want to contribute and add value to people, on the other hand it seems profitable to always upvote yourself while at the same time upvoting others. It's something I'm having trouble wrapping my head around economically and ethically. In an ideal world all of my upvotes would be from other people, but it's like I have this "free" money here since I spent my hard-earned money to buy steem, so it would feel wasteful not to at least allocate part of it to myself if I feel that I am contributing in some meaningful way to the conversation.
Well if it helps you out, if you reward others then it is likely that they will be more likely to trade it around or get more people to buy into it this increasing the value where if you just reward yourself and nobody else then it is less likely to increase your value in the long run. Basically it becomes a quick buck and thats it. So how you come to a decision on what it morally right or wrong, up to you... but at least what you are doing isn't decreasing the value of the reward pool in amounts that are actually noticeable to other people.
Well if nothing else your resources gave me a chance to objectively look at the proportions, which gives me a more accurate idea of how I feel about it. (When I just do 1 upvote for someone else with content I appreciate and 1 for myself when I contribute meaningfully, it feels pretty fair, but seeing the numbers in a pie chart... it feels a lot different). Thanks for helping me clarify my feelings on the matter.
Glad there are people as generous as you in this situation! No worries.