First off, there's a difference between self-voting your own post, and self-voting your own comments. As far as I know, just about everyone self-votes their own posts. Op is discussing people writing tons of comments, and upvoting all of their own comments, purely for profit.
I think the problem is that if this behavior continues, it will encourage everyone to only vote for themselves. Steemit is supposed to be a social network. Not a new investment strategy that requires a whole bunch of useless comments and self-votes.
I think farming your own upvotes should be discouraged, even with flagging.
I don't think that self-voting to improve the visibility of your comment is wrong. I don't think self-voting your own posts is wrong either. Even tipping yourself a few dollars to not let your VP go to waste is OK with me.
My problem is with people farming self-votes. There is no possible way that this behavior is beneficial to the Steemit community.
STEEM has a lot of its value because it's part of an actual functional social network. If outsiders look at Steemit and see most of the people just farming their own upvotes, the value of STEEM will go down. Then all of the STEEM you've earned from your hard work will be worth nothing.
That TOTALLY Makes sense @fronttowardenemy @ethical-ai
That is over the top and self serving behavior. That's weird to me people would even do That, but sadly, not surprising. I wouldn't even think to do that....