See, here's the thing about the self upvote.

Unless you are in the top 10% of SP holders on Steemit, your self upvote is going to be less valuable than pretty much anything else that you could be doing. At least if you are engaged in posting "a reasonable amount," and I think that we can agree that a reasonable amount is less than eight posts per day, which is where the system itself begins to limit the rewards that you can get. That feels more than generous enough to me, at least for mid length content.

The only thing that a self vote unless you are a gigantic whale impacts is whether or not some other people can get just a little bit more reward for curating you than otherwise. At the level of SP that people like you and I, and the vast, vast array of users on the platform possess, that is a really small amount of value. And the major impact is if you take the first vote before anyone else can get to it.

If you self vote after that first hour, just to be safe – you won't affect anyone else's rewards on your post. There is even less argument from anyone who is being reasonable and arguing from a position of rationality that you would be incurring harm or impacting someone else unnecessarily. You will gain a very slight difference in potential rewards by passing up on that first vote on something you posted, and the amount is truly minuscule, by and large.

As a result, I literally cannot come up with a good reason not to upvote your own content – but only after the first hour. I like to think of that very, very slight loss in income that I pass up on by not taking the first curational vote as a very tiny advertising cost. Some of the big players who like to play very tight margins like to get that optimum vote in. If I don't take it, they're more likely to and that their vote is a lot larger and more valuable than my own at that point.

Right now, I've settled on a sort of rhythm on a roughly every other day schedule. If I look and see how much voting power I have after voting up the content that I have found that interests me for the day, and I have more than 75% left, I will go to my blog posts or my comments and start dropping 100% votes until I get down to roughly 75% VP, at which point I stop because it will take most of a day to regenerate that VP back up to reasonable levels. On top of that, I have made my usual upvote on content that I like 20%, because frankly I think that 10 votes a day is ridiculously low, I want to reward more people and spread the value that I can bring to 50 posts and comments a day, and that adjustment allows me to do just that. And most days I have enough percentage left to drop the rest on myself.

From where I sit that seems like the maximum amount of value that I can bring to content on the blockchain and to myself.

Now, whether I believe that down votes are an effective means of policing the blockchain and whether it's reasonable to make the decision that someone "doesn't deserve what other people have decided to give them" is a debate of a different color, and I believe I can make a persuasive argument that it is almost always more valuable to the community as a whole to take that VP that you would have otherwise burnt on downloading someone and spend it on upvoting content that you really do want to support, which instead of removing overall value ends up increasing overall value, rewarding people that you like, and making exactly the same change to the reward pool distribution that you would have otherwise – and possibly more if the value of your down vote was larger than the potential earnings of your target.

But that's an efficiency argument and it's for another day.

If we accept that "code is law," as other people have suggested, then given that self voting is possible – it must be acceptable. If it's acceptable, then we can do it. If there are rational, fiscal trade-offs for doing so, let's talk about those in the context of how much they're actually worth.

Which is just a very wordy and long-winded way to say: I am in agreement with you for the most part, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.