If you're a quality content creator then a self-vote wouldn't be that bad, but the problem is that you're not the best person to decide how good your own content is.
But the problem currently is that comments which are contributing hardly anything or even spam comments are being self-upvoted.
It's best if self-voting is eliminated almost entirely by the protocol itself.
I can see that, but wouldn't a self-voting from someone without much SP be negligible? If someone is self-voting, but has a lot of SP, wouldn't that mean they either paid a lot into the system or have had other people give them upvotes?
1 time it's negligible, but not if everyone does it. It also doesn't matter how someone attained a lot of SP, it's just way better to always vote on others. Nothing good comes from selfishness.
You make a good point, but you don't think that self promotion is in anyway built into the platform? Why would it be created that way? Look, I don't have anything to gain from upvoting myself other than maybe a penny, but that might be a way people help to make their content more visible. I haven't done so, but what if someone were to invest $10,000 into Steemit and buy a ton of Steem Power. Why would that be terrible if they wanted to self-promote? Maybe if all they did was self-voting, but I guess I don't like the idea of totally taking away the ability to do self-promote. I've been wrong on many things, but I just don't see how self-voting is really bringing things down.
The more you self-vote, the less rewards others get. It's just simple math. The reward pool is limited.
I don't like how the protocol is designed, there's already post promotion so i don't see any need to self-vote. The problem in the protocol lies with curation, people can self-vote, flag good content, upvote bad content with hardly any repercussions.