what's shameful about self voting? it's a way towards financial independence and is a foundational design principle. in fact, people not self voting and powering us is probably one of the main causes of this currency struggling to take off.
I take time and effort in generating original content and building genuine connections with my readers and other creators, each day I split my votes so half of them are for me and half are for others, unless I am swamped with work, then I just self upvote and then upvote all my genuine repliers at a 100%.
maybe if more people did that, we would have less pyramid schemes on here and in the real world.
Self voting is fine when you do it as you described. I vote for my own material, but curate a large amount of content as well. Joe's practice is to only vote for himself. Before he turned his account into a voting bot he'd comment on all the hot and trending posts and upvote his comment (but not the post itself...). He then votes on his own posts. And never votes for another content creator.
Joe's approach to making money on Steemit is to focus on his account, and his account only. He has no community approach here.