No, that is NOT "self-interest". That is self-absorption, and it's the result of the corruption of the profit motive. Additionally, as I said in a stand-alone comment here,

"From the start I have not been a fan of how this site is run in regard to votes, whales, and witnesses.

I think it's retarded.

This is my suggestion, one that I put on a post that is related in topic:
My emphasis is on making it easy to have reference to the line of creation.

Strangely, one of my favorite features of facebook is the Share button.
All I have to do is click on that, and BOOM, the article or post is shared, and the original author automatically attributed.

I think the best way to reduce plagiarism is to make authors WANT you to share their work.
Why? Because they will profit from it.
How? Because the link to them is automatically included, and each share gives them that much more money.

There could be two heuristics:

1. Reshare, with something like (to make a general number up) 80% of the value of that post going to the original author.
2. A comparison of the content written by the re-share-er, in that the more content that is written, the lower the percentage of the profit goes to the original author. Into, let's say, 50%, or more, depending on how well (how many upvotes) the post receives.

I've been talking about this for a while.

I also talked with the creators of tsu about it.
There's a lot of things I said to them, and they weren't very receptive.

The same way that @larkenrose doesn't especially mind it if people share his work (because it spreads anarchy, so he wins, and humanity wins, anyhow), so too does it make sense to create a mechanism whereby to invert the incentive and philosophy of "copyright" and "author protection".

What if the more people "copied" and "pasted" the work, the more money the author would make?"

In other words, I think it's entirely inaccurate to say that this Tragedy of the Commons is anything more than the corporatist involvement of self-destructive and self-absorbed influences of the scarcity model of statism.

Is it really in people's self-interest for steemit to implode?
My self-interest is that the social network that functions the best would thrive.
steemit has impressed me in a number of ways.
In others... I'm left rolling my eyes.

Especially with all of the focus on money.

It's really quite simply to create a sustaining system of people supporting people.
You've just got to make it easy and convenient.
On this one point alone, Facebook is the singular shining example.

Adopt that one thing #steemit @steemit, and watch all of that bullcrap and stuff that you programmed the whales for become irrelevant (for the most part, at least).