Self-voting is allowed on Reddit. In fact, your posts there are upvoted by default.

Being able to self-vote is not what makes Steem distinct and it is certainly not a merit of the platform. 

On the contrary, I believe it retards the rate of adoption by people who understands the natural bias of self and how that affects actual quality and the level of effort authors put into their work. Self voting lends to complacency (especially higher stake holders ) don't necessarily have to work as hard whereas a minnow busting their ass creating content is under rewarded. This is centralization and has the tendency to result in less diversity of content.

I have seen a ton of low effort content receive inordinate rewards because of rampant self-voting and vote-buying. Because of this and other problems, I agree with this initiative of @l0ki and @personz 100% although I am not sure of it's current state. 

To be frank, it is the nature of the self voter to oppose this because it undermines the very mechanism by which they are profiting in a manner that MANY believe is ethically questionable. They are making relatively easier money which is precisely why they don't want to level the playing field. Well, the end result is Steem is "pay to play" not unlike politics. I will say it and will say it again. Self voting is antithetical to decentralization and is why I have been apprehensive about investing any more money onto this platform and I would venture there are not only a few of us that feel the same. We are many but are voices muzzled while the voices of self voters get louder.

You assume that the people who are self voting aren't "good content creators".  If indeed they are not, then we can counteract their overindulgent self-voting by flagging (and people are already starting to do that, myself included).  

Banning self-voting can only undermine the price of Steem.  For instance, I have personally purchased thousands of dollars of SP (and I know many others who have done the same) so that I can influence what content gets visibility on the Steem platform, INCLUDING ESPECIALLY MY OWN.  I (and many others) would have NEVER purchased so much, much less held it for so long, if doing so didn't increase my ability to get more exposure for my own content.   

What you are overlooking is that it's NOT the authors and curatiors that give Steem value.  The authors and curators come here only becasue Steem HAS value, and Steem has value not because it's "earned" by posting and curating but becasue people like my are willing to BUY it with money and HOLD it.  It has value because capital (money) is flowing into it.  That money flows into it in large part becasue people who acquire and hold Steem have a greater likelihood gaining exposure for their own content.   The more Steem one holds, the greater one's voice on the platform.   If we only allow that voice to be heard when it speaks of others and not when it speaks of the Steem holder himself or herself, then Steem's value declines. 

Were there no other way of dealing with inappropriate self-voting, then I would agree that the damage done to capital inflows by banning self-voting may be worth it.   But when the problem is easily solved by other means (like flagging), banning self-voting will do nothing but limit capital inflow and thereby reduce the value of Steem.  Lower Steem prices means inferior authors and curators.

Look around, friend,  Steem is healthier than ever.  New users are way up.  The price of Steem is way up.  Alex ranking is way up!   Growth is exponential.   Your panic over self-voting is completley unjustified and unneeded.   

Here's the bottom line:  Those who want to ban self-voting are mainly folks who seek to acquire Steem by posting and curating rather than by PURCHASE.  But it's only the latter that gives Steem value.   And folks who are willing to purchase Steem do so in large part becasue they can influence the exposure of their own content.

From the whitepaper:

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Eliminating “abuse” is not possible and shouldn’t be the goal. Even those who are attempting to “abuse” the system are still doing work. Any compensation they get for their successful attempts at abuse or collusion is at least as valuable for the purpose of distributing the currency as the make-work system employed by traditional Bitcoin mining or the collusive mining done via mining pools. All that is necessary is to ensure that abuse isn’t so rampant that it undermines the incentive to do real work in support of the community and its currency.
The goal of building a community currency is to get more “crabs in the bucket”. Going to extreme measures to eliminate all abuse is like attempting to put a lid on the bucket to prevent a few crabs from escaping and comes at the expense of making it harder to add new crabs to the bucket. It is sufficient to make the walls slippery and give the other crabs sufficient power to prevent others from escaping.
____

More from the whitepaper:

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The impact of this voting and payout distribution is to offer large bounties for good content while still rewarding smaller players for their long-tail contribution.
The economic effect of this is similar to a lottery where people over-estimate their probability of getting votes and thus do more work than the expected value of their reward and thereby maximize the total amount of work performed in service of the community. The fact that everyone “wins something” plays on the same psychology that casinos use to keep people 
gambling. In other words, small rewards help reinforce the idea that it is possible to earn bigger rewards.
____

On that point, exactly

The Steemit guys talk about collusion and giving those with most votes a *disproportionate* amount of rewards as if it's a good thing, but they don't really explain *why*.

In what way does it help Steemit that 99% of its users get close to nothing but 1% get the vast majority of rewards?

It also creates some kind of perverse incentive, which makes quadratic voting even worse than FPTP voting, if it were to be used for politics. Think about it - with FPTP you're already incentivized to only vote for the two biggest parties/two most popular candidates, due to the spoiler effect. 

With quadratic voting you're *super-incentivized* to vote for the two most popular candidates/parties. Can you see how bad quadratic voting would be for a democracy, by creating a permanent super-duopoly? If so, then you draw the same conclusions for why quadratic voting is bad for Steemit.

But that comes with several costs: one, the effort of managing at least two accounts (I am now doing this, and it's an irritating load on my attention) and two, that the rewards cannot be quickly moved to the voting account from the reward receiving account, at least, the half of the rewards that goes into SP.