Self-upvotes shouldn't count. There isn't much value in a platform curated by bank account size. But self voting is often more rewarding, so it gives whales an advantage while also disincentivizing everyone's use of their limited vote power on less rewarding real curation.
Promotion bots make the problem worse. I know they're seen as a way for minnows to compete with whales, but instead they just get used by whales on a larger scale than minnows can afford, further increasing the self-promotion disparity.
The main change needed to make fixing these things possible, is allowing each steemit account to have multiple sub-channels. Once this is implemented, we could reasonably start discouraging multiple accounts.
Both self-upvoting and promotion bots directly counter the very idea of this platform. But until the community consensus comes around on this, and until proper functionality is added to allow people to rely on a single account, I will continue to upvote my own posts and use promotion services to compete.