You have the support of the SteemThat.com community for sure. We run a small curation service for members and then do still have one promotion upvote bot for minnows to help them get started with earning some rewards on high quality posts. I'm not against using promotion services for high quality posts. Every writer that is smart markets their posts. I often ping them, add them to every promotion service that is free I can find, submit them to google and bing. I add them to SteemThat social network, twitter, facebook, and if I have the funds I'll buy some upvote on a really solid post.

Lately there have been thousands per day essentially stolen from the rewards pool. This has been really an epidemic for a while. I think removing this button is a first step. By having it there it validates the use of self-voting.

Another option might be to reduce the rewards from self upvoting to an average upvote amount. This way if people want a higher self upvote they need to raise the value of minnows upvotes to raise their own upvote! This is my favorite option because maybe it will encourage support and growth of newer members that are really the future of the platform.

I'm the 99% On Steemit!