I think you're forgetting that self voting from the same account only just became really lucrative, since hard fork 19. You and several others talk about it like it's some kind of institution but the truth is that it has exploded since hf 19 when everyone realized it gave them so much.
Are you aware that self voting was something the creators of Steemit explicitly tried to incentivize against? Check this out from the whitepaper which I'll quote at length in an attempt to deal with this criticism generally:
2.5.2 Voting on Distribution of Currency
The naive voting process creates a Prisoner’s Dilemma whereby each indi- vidual voter has incentive to vote for themselves at the expense of the larger community goal. If every voter defects by voting for themselves then no cur- rency will end up distributed and the currency as a whole will fail to gain network effect. On the other hand, if only one voter defects then that voter would win undeserved profits while having minimal effect on the overall value of the currency.
In order to realign incentives and discourage individuals from simply voting for themselves, money must be distributed in a nonlinear manner. For example a quadratic function in votes, i.e., someone with twice the votes of someone else should receive four times the payout and someone with three times the votes should receive nine times the payout. In other words, the reward is proportional to
votes^2rather thanvotes. This mirrors the value of network effect which grows withn^2the number of participants, according to Metcalfe’s Law.
Assuming all users have equal stake, someone who only receives their own vote will receive much less than someone who receives votes from 100 different users. This encourages users to cooperate to vote for the same things to maximize the payout. This system also creates financial incentive to collude where everyone votes on one thing and then divides the reward equally among themselves.
Some something has happened here, either this is no longer relevant as Steemit has changed, or the current situation actually amounts to a bug. I believe it is the latter.
The Steemit guys talk about collusion and giving those with most votes a disproportionate amount of rewards as if it's a good thing, but they don't really explain why.
In what way does it help Steemit that 99% of its users get close to nothing but 1% get the vast majority of rewards?
It also creates some kind of perverse incentive, which makes quadratic voting even worse than FPTP voting, if it were to be used for politics. Think about it - with FPTP you're already incentivized to only vote for the two biggest parties/two most popular candidates, due to the spoiler effect.
With quadratic voting you're super-incentivized to vote for the two most popular candidates/parties. Can you see how bad quadratic voting would be for a democracy, by creating a permanent super-duopoly? If so, then you draw the same conclusions for why quadratic voting is bad for Steemit.