RE: To vote yourself up, or not to vote yourself up, that's the question.
It's an important question, and one I have pondered quite a bit.
if I write something important... Something I really want everyone to see... I will upvote myself, not for the reward, but for the self promotion purpose.
That's close to how I feel about it. I generally would not upvote my root posts, that's for others to do. Upvoting my post feels a bit like buying a copy of my own book to boost sales. It's manipulation...
For me, it's more about upvoting comments, and only in very specific situations... namely if I "arrive late" at a post about some topic I feel passionate about and (perhaps) have expertise in... and then write a long and complex response. And then it's at the bottom of 183 comments... where (very likely) nobody will read it and use it as part of the discussion. In THAT case, I will upvote my own comment, only because I can "bump" it up to the first 10 comments or so, where it might get read... and become a "discussion." It's pretty much like "bumping" a post, in the old days of web message boards.
Other than that, no I don't tend to upvote myself... it just has an ethically dodgy feel to it. My wife does upvote my posts, and I upvote hers... that's a slightly less insidious form of nepotism...
Is it? or isn't it? Now we have to open a whole new discussion on that.... (just kidding)... this one has gotten everyone think already.
At the minimum, the great comments that have been shared, hopefully it grabs the attention of people developing the chain so they can either confirm its fine, or change their view.
That's why I will upvote a comment of my own, infrequently. It's to put my comment higher up in a discussion.
If it's "social media", then I would expect that family and friends would get more up-votes than random strangers. That's part of the equation when you're evaluating subjective value from your own perspective.
I don't even have a problem with self-upvoting, provided that it's not coupled with spammy content. IMO, the problem isn't self-voting. The problem is the incentive that self-voting might create for people to intentionally produce and vote on low-value content. That would be sort of like a form of embezzling.
We paid/contributed to earn the right to vote. That includes the right to vote on our own stuff, and our family's.
You're exactly right, the problem is the lack of incentive to vote on others.