Why the stigma towards how investors use their Steem Power but no stigma towards how miners use their mining rigs?
Steem has a rewards budget. It's part of the social contract and stated pretty explicitly in the white paper.
The budget comes from dilution of stakeholders and doesn't exist to increase the holdings of major stakeholders. Extracting the rewards at the expense of the network undermines the premise and value of the network as a whole.
Some won't see it that way, but it's in the financial interest of the largest stakeholders to counter this behaviour.
Edit: I don't want to ban or punish all self voting. There is plenty of blatant milking going on though. It's at everyone's individual discretion where they draw the line and what's worth disputing/downvoting over.
I like that point. The "social" aspect of Steemit does imply a different understood contract between all the participants.
I would actually argue that there's a social contract in Bitcoin as well, and it's the neglect of the social contract over time which has resulted in the community becoming dysfunctional.
Well said. Without a shared, uncensored community platform for communication things can and do get toxic.
On the contrary, the empirical data has shown that when all rewards are going to the same people (which is still inflation), with little for new users, the network stagnates. When new users are getting rewards, it grows. This can be seen quite clearly in @eroche's payout distribution posts.