I think self-voting on your own comments is rarely good, but upvoting your own posts, if they are good and you slaved away at writing them, is perfectly fine.
I write long text based posts and I spend a lot of time on each one of those, I feel like my upvote partially helps me be rewarded for my work, and since it is my stake it makes sense.
On the other hand, I upvote myself on those posts because I think it helps with visibility.
I see what you're getting at in what concerns to Whale, and frankly I still am not at a point where I think too much about it... ,maybe one day.