I have been wondering about this self upvoting. What gets people upset, is obviously when someone can just make value from their already earned value. I understand that there are several whales who have been abusing this power by upvoting their own comments and videos without giving anything back to community. Problem of steemit, atleast for me who has been trying to make money here is that gamers are poor as hell. There is a guy with steemit name of who manages to get like 20 upvotes, yet my contribution from his payout is about half. I personally get about 5-8 upvotes per video now, but payout is not even a dollar. I'm not here claiming that "my videos should earn more", but instead I'm saying that many of those upvotes should be worth more. I have been upvoting comments on my videos and I plan to do that in the future, as it will benefit us all in long term.
As payouts are given in both steem-power and sbd, it should be very easy to grow power whilest still taking some out to improve my life. Simply leaving steem-power and using SBD for direct income. Remember that creators and curators both benefit from content, and that I will keep uvoting meaningfull comments, it should not be away from you, as we all benefit.
Ps. I would make minnows by sending people 5000 steem-power like one whale once did, but I have no money for that. We just need to trust to trickle-down economics.