Hey @helenoftroy! I am not expert on this but will give you my thoughts. I believe that yes it does apply to posts too. I think the reasoning is that @abh12345 believes that your votes should be used to curate good content and to reward community building efforts (ie like helping newbies or certain projects). Now this is just a sentiment that is something that he (and others like me) believes is the best use of our votes. There are others that think that believe differently of course.

I think the main thing is for you to always do your best and to always try to help others. Sometimes like you say, a self-vote may be something that benefits your follows. A lot will depend on your size and the type of following that you have. For me it is best to try to reward others with my vote, as I am still very small so my upvote of my own post will not provide much in curation.

I wasn't around in July, but I can imagine what that was like. It sounds like there were some that were trying to encourage followers by promising to "give" an upvote after the initial 30 min to reward curation to the first people upvoting them. Like I said I wasn't here, so I don't know but that would make some sense if there was less content available.

The goal of course is that this place develops into a real community and people can earn and have fun and socialize in many ways. To do that, we will need to all think through our strategies and try to do our best. If we collectively all have a every person for themselves, the it is likely that we will go back and reset and do it all over again!

Which is fine with me btw, I would love to buy steem back in the $0.25 to 0.50 range again!