For me, it's basically like @master-set is saying:
I'm selfvoting. But don't like it. It's just economically incentivised in a current system, so me and others just do what they must to get profits.
In my ideal Steemit world, upvotes go to good quality content. In our current Steemit world, this is far from the case and it is basically just about who you know (or better yet: who knows you) and how rich you are in your Steem Power.
I wrote about it yesterday. I feel the older minnows are being left out in the cold in favor of upvoting newbies for being now. This frustrates me, because I see the amount of upvotes declining. This has led me to upvote some of my own, longer comments, to make sure I atleast earn just a little bit still. I don't particularly like it, but Steemit isn't fair anyway, so sometimes I just can't care too much anymore...
I read your post, very candid take on things.
My own opinion is that outgoing votes (i.e. for others) are going down as self votes increase. I need to make sure the data supports this but it seems to be what's happening.
That could very well be possible. Thinking about this, I auto upvote my post when publishing. This automatically happens at 100%, while I have adjusted my votes on other people's posts, to make sure I can upvote as many as I did before.
I have decreased the amount of people I vote for and I vote up my closer friends all 100%. It feels bad not supporting many people as there are so many new users.. I wish there was a solution.. but now with low rewards I think a LOT of people will go underpaid while the whales (witnesses and insiders) continue to increase voting power for themselves so they don't lose as much dollar value from price decrease as everyone else. This certainly seems the case with Steemvoter daily reward pool rape.