Well, I can only trace through the ideas and arguments that are made over time. A lot of people have discussed this as a possibility, and I'm sure there are even forks who have tried it. It definitely pushes us into the area of needing to discuss alts or sock accounts created to do the exact same thing and how best to handle that... which means further curve changes, account costs, or perhaps the idea that there really does need to be more downvoting by everyone... and it gets harder to "see" who is doing the worst stuff because they might actually be X amount of accounts. It means that we have to ask ourselves, "If I expect someone to buy and power up Steem to pay me via voting, then am I myself expected to then do the same for them?". And I think, most importantly, that not being able to self vote to some degree is a pretty discouraging forcing of your hand. If the curation system fails you and you write a great piece that has no recognition or rewards, do you feel that with the stake that you have earned through blood, sweat, or tears, or perhaps bought dearly with other resources you shouldn't be allowed to allocate some value to it? If you write an insightful comment and it is wayyyyyy down on a post and you believe whole-heartedly it needs to be curated up into the best version of conversation on a post, should you not be allowed to use the resources you busted ass for to do so? This is not a flip question. In fact, even without disallowing self voting, these questions are still to some degree relevant.

I'm sure you've heard me say, time and again- voting yourself is not inherently bad. Standing behind your own work and saying, "I see value in this and have worked hard to be able to allocate value towards it" is not bad. I don't care what flavour your donut is as long as it's got sprinkles and at the end of the day you feel good about what you've done and how you're contributing to the ecosystem. The problem with the egregious self voters is the same problem with the egregious bid bot abusers is the same problem with botnet accounts farming rewards without self voting at all. I wish I could say or find that one size fits all easy answer because I would be ready to stand behind it and push for it as hard as I can. For now, I'm doing my best to listen to all opinions and build the best knowledge base that I myself can work from, as an individual, working with a blockchain of individuals.

and the sneak edit: Turning off the bid bots comes down to... how do you turn them off? Do you find a way to take their stake that wouldn't then put your account in the same space? Take the stake of the people delegating without then opening yourself to that form of abuse? Do you use a front end to hide them? (this is happening on Steempeak and on PALnet and others, and I think matters a bit) Redistribute a new asset without them? How do you give that asset value? (PALcoin's new journey.) How do you take a steem account out of someone's hands, or forcefully nullify someone's stake? What does that authority look like? Who can decide? Where is the line on enough? The answers feel so easy when we look at the examples of abuse out there, but unless you can convince a bid bot author to just...stop, or a bid bot delegator to just... stop, then there becomes a whole new HF's worth of potential changes to try to do some of these things (many of which people came to crypto to avoid by bank interference,) and even now- the distribution is done. If all the bidbots stopped today, the distribution is still inequitable.

All of these things are part of the whole- that economic context I discussed above. Were there one, simple, surefire one size fits all fix that we could implement today to turn it around, it would be done yesterday. But that's not where we are, and so now we have to challenge the way we think and the way we all act to try to push things in the right direction.