I do not self vote anything I create on steem. That goes for comments and posts. I like to use the number of votes and steem received as a gauge to how well my work is doing.
That being said, there have been a few time where I thought, "hm, if I upvote this the author would have a better chance to see it."
It's a tricky subject for sure...
Number of votes is not a good metric as it becomes quite arbitrary. Views is a better metric but not perfect.
That is a good point. Forgot about the vote trails that we have here.