Great discussion point, this is one of the things that, for someone like me who just got here, seems a bit off. Self voting when you have a $100 vote puts you right at the top of the hot section which will garner all the attention of the minnows and dolphins because they want to upvote and comment in order to try to get votes from people with value. I understand some people are well established and others are heavily invested, but the system makes it difficult to gain much traction starting out.
I think it would be interesting to see something like only allowing self votes after one day of being posted, or perhaps increase the rewards for curation and decrease the rewards for self voting. The first idea would make it so hot articles were actually more "viral" than just being self voted, and the second could promote more interaction where whales are working to upvote content they enjoy while still being rewarded in a similar way. Just throwing some quick ideas out, the solution isn't apparent, that's for sure.
There was also some talk about having users of similar levels be able to cancel eachothers votes.