This is in response to @l0k1's TLDR section of Introducing Smackdown Kitty.
I'll just clearly state my position: Your stake is your stake. You earned it. Use it any way you want.
Is self-voting bad? No. Is it good? No. It's completely neutral.
I know this is just an appeal to authority, but according to @dan:
It is so sad seeing people fight over nothing. The whales who vote and consume rewards from the reward pool only take out of one pocket and put it in another.
You can take the above quote with a grain of salt. But the original context was in response to criticism of how stakeholders were voting with their own stake.
From @l0k1's TLDR:
Self voting provides no information about quality, only peers can be judges, and an individual is not their own peer
False premise. Voting is not about peer review. It is about using your stake as you please.
Self voting resembles arrogance and conceit socially. In Australia we would say 'to put tickets on yourself'
False analogy. It is arrogance to imply that someone cannot use their own stake as they please.
Because self voting diverts rewards from the pool without adding information, these votes are essentially Spam in terms of entropy
False equivalence. All voting allocates rewards. What is the purpose of the "entropy" buzzword here?
Self voting is an incentive to fill up the blockchain with intentionally meaningless posts and comments, and is an ongoing and escalating extra cost for those who run the network (witnesses)
Slippery slope. This would only be a concern if voting was unlimited. It also impies that the platform is unable to scale. Do you have evidence for this? That would be a much bigger piece of news.
To the outside world, it is another thing to point a finger at Steem and declare it is a scam
Post hoc ergo propter hoc. If we cannot use our stake as we please, then it's a scam.
Let's put this in perspective. Somehow, a person with 1,000 SP is going to vote ten times a day and walk off with 2 STEEM every day by self-voting (compounding daily, yes I know).
The really weird thing is, this person isn't going to ever realize that they could make more by voting for other people's good content. You know what? I'm fine with that. Their loss.