Hmm, that's a really tough question and there is no easy, cut and dried answer, like most other voting in Steemit, this is subjective proof of work.

Certainly the two extremes: never voting yourself and always voting yourself sound wrong to me. It's ok to vote yourself sometimes, as long as you don't do it too much, too often, or too high value.

I vote myself when:

• I want visibility, to get my comment to float to the top, because I think it's really important
• I want to speak with authority, like if I'm flagging someone for spam and explaining why.
• And yea, i'll totally admit, sometimes I just want a few extra pennies from the system

The situation I describe above in my post just felt wrong to me. If kingscrown had voted himself 7$ and nnnhhh 7$, I would have been fine with that.