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RE: Simple test for right vs wrong on the steem blockchain... there is more to it than "the code is law".
upvoting thyself is not in my league. I see it to be self serving.
upvoting thyself is not in my league. I see it to be self serving.
I don't have a problem with people serving themselves SOME. The problem began when people were taking that to excess. Comments were before that up vote a couple of cents to move it up in visibility, and that usually wasn't bad. I actually remember the first time comment up voting brought a distaste. A very powerful individual before HF19 was down voting people to "protect the reward pool". Then I noticed him up voting some of his own comments by like $8. That certainly was not protecting the reward pool. It was the hypocrisy in that action that brought it to my attention. I and others called him out on it and he stopped. He DOES have steemit as an interest at heart, I just don't think he seriously thought it through.
After HF19 we saw a ton of people up voting themselves more than that. I witnessed some guy debating with me where we had quite a lengthy discussion. His initial comment he up voted was around $3 all from himself. By the end he was somewhere around $1.30 and I figure he easily had up voted himself in the neighborhood of $30 just on comments talking to me. The funny thing is it was a capitalism vs communism debate and he was the pro-communist guy talking about how capitalists just consolidate wealth and feed upon people. It ended when I pointed out what he had been doing. He also muted me after that. ;)
Yet I also think people have a right to serve themselves some as well. There should be no guilt in a person helping themselves. The key is that they need to consider if what they are doing is something everyone did would it crash the system, ruin it, etc.
People have been up voting their own POSTS (not comments) all along until a week or so ago when that being the default was changed. It didn't really hurt the platform at all.
The rampant impact of self voting people's own comments didn't really kick in until HF19. Though prior to that there were people recommending it to new people in tutorials. I even did it for a few weeks when I first started (over a year ago) due to one of those tutorials. Then I found out about voting % and realized that by voting my own comment I was diluting my voting power which made me less able to support content I liked by other people and encourage the growth of the platform. So I stopped voting my comments due to that reason. Yet that was also still self serving. I can serve myself while still helping the platform. I love this place and I want it to grow so even though I help the platform to me that is still self serving, as I am doing what I want for a place I care about. Basically what I'm getting at is self serving is not always bad. It CAN BE, but I wanted you to know that some amount of self interest is good and is part of survival.
It's when we let our self interest drag everyone else down and don't give a shit about it that it becomes a bad thing. And yes there are degrees. Though I don't believe anyone has the right to tell you what those degrees are. That's totally up to you. ;)