I don't think it's bad to self vote. You can only do it once per post anyways. I agree that by balancing it out with rewarding others for decent comments or posts, you remain true to the goal of the platform.
Maybe if you're a huge whale with a crazy amount of power and you're only posting to upvote yourself, then that's not really fair. But there's nothing preventing that. In the end, the majority of us are here because of some kind of financial incentive. Otherwise, there are platforms like Medium, which boasts 30,000,000 readers and features regularly curated content that features on their homepage.
Plus, I feel that it's a waste for me to remain at 100% voting power. Unfortunately, i don't always have the time to find great content, read and upvote, and that's because I have a demanding job.
There are a lot of empty posts on Steemit too like "this is a flower, please like and follow me. Follow for Follow". I'm tired of that.
I realized that I made a mistake by immediately following back anybody that followed me or engaged on my posts, because I ended up with all that crappy content in my feed. I'm working on cleaning up my following list and reducing it to only those that I feel are actually worth following! Otherwise, it's hard to find good content when you land on the home page!
Content is King! And if you invest the time to write great articles then you should reward yourself with a little upvote too. Because you deserve that!
And without a decent following or an investment in upvote bots, it becomes difficult to gain visibility on your posts, and it just gets lost in the noise.
For great content I invite you to look at @ecotrain, a nice mix.
I understand your difficulties with finding great content, if the ecotrain authors sometimes don´t put out the usual number of articles in a day, for whatever reason, busy with other stuff I guess, I also don´t really know where to check and what to read and what to upvote.
Well said soul.
If you want music to listen too whilst you clean your page,
I'm your man :). Original curator.
The Mute button is your friend.
Yes, specially if you write in a minority language it is hard to get noticed.