I've noticed that there is a fair amount of controversy about self-upvoting. The way some people talk about it, you'd almost think it was evil. Other people say that the ability to upvote your own content is one of the perks of investing in the Steemit platform by powering up your STEEM.
I'm with the second group. I believe that when you tie up your STEEM by powering it up, you help out the currency by essentially taking it off the market. The more STEEM is kept away from the market, the less selling pressure and therefore, the better the price will be for those times when someone does want to sell STEEM.
It makes sense to reward people for performing such a valuable service to the entire STEEM ecosystem. The reward you get is that you get to influence where the monetary rewards go. That means that you can influence some of those rewards right into your wallet.
Steemit is engineered for blog post self-upvoting. Anytime you publish a post, the default option is to upvote it as soon as you publish it. You can choose to not upvote it, but the people who designed Steemit clearly expect that of course, you will upvote your own work. And why wouldn't you?
The controversy seems to focus on upvoting your own comments. Some people flat out won't upvote a comment that has been upvoted by its author. They figure the author already has taken his or her reward.
I believe it's kind of silly to make an issue out of that. If the comment is good and you liked it, then upvote it. Don't worry about who else upvoted it.
But, since I've encountered at least two people who claim they will never upvote a self-upvoted comment, I figure there are probably others out there. So just to be safe, I don't upvote my comments right away. That way, if one of those anti-author-comment-upvote people happens to read one and like it, then they'll upvote it and not be turned off by me tooting my own horn. Then a few days later, I might go back and upvote all my old comments. By then they are old news and no one is going to care, least of all, the people who originally upvoted them.
But I do upvote my work. It's not because I think everything I ever post here is amazing or brilliant. It's that since HF19, every comment goes from zero to 18 cents once I upvote it. It seems silly to me to turn down that money. After all, the reason I fairly regularly buy STEEM and then power it up is so that I can make money off it. Steemit is unique in that there's this intermediate step called posting content before you can realize any kind of return on investment. Of course, there is potential to make more money when others upvote my work, but it's sure nice to know that I have a way to easily earn a Dollar or more a day just by upvoting five or six of my own comments each day.
Another aspect of the comment self-upvoting controversy stems from the perception that those who upvote their own comments are not upvoting other people's content. It's like they're hogging all the rewards for themselves. Right or wrong, it's a real perception, so my advice is to make a point to upvote plenty of other people if you are going to upvote your own comments. Even if people think you're hogging the rewards you can have a clear conscience because you know your own voting habits. I personally follow several curation trails on Streemian and I also have automatic upvoting rules set up in my SteemVoter account, mostly for upvoting minnows. My voting strength hardly ever goes higher than 40 percent because of all the automatic voting I do for other people's work. In other words, no one can credibly claim I don't vote for other people. In addition, by delaying the self upvoting of many of my comments, hopefully that mitigates the perception that I upvote myself too much.
It's also important to remember that because Steemit is a social network, you generally do better on Steemit by being social and generous with your upvoting. If you want to get ahead, help others get ahead and you'll get there faster. That really does apply on Steemit. So, even though it's not wrong, if you're self-upvoting at the expense of upvoting others, you're really shooting yourself in the foot.
So I say upvote your own posts and comments all you want. But be sure to also upvote other people's work.
If you're reading this and happen to be a small minnow (less than 1,000 SP), feel free to let me know that so I can take a look at your work and see if it would be a good fit for wiser automatic voting.