RE: Upvoting Yourself
Top of the post or any comment, a little white flag turns into a red flag.
Use it wisely, and only downvote someone by leaving a comment as to why.
Be also ready for retaliation when you downvote someone. If you are higher reputation they can't hurt you as much as you can hurt them.
It's unfortunate, but downvoting someone causes instant anger. I often give the person an opporunity to correct their mistake and I'll remove the downvote. But if they insist on continuing, well it's going to be their loss, because other people will eventually downvote them too if they keep up the behavior.
The most common reason for a downvote is when someone is obviously cheating the system. Reading through my blog I've given numerous posts over the last year that gives advice on what good things you can do... and what bad things not to do.. it's a worthy read.
It's a bit of a bummer, because by that logic a good post that no one bothered to upvote (because there aren't many users / they didn't see it / they already saw many posts by that point and are kind of tuning out etc.) comes across the same as something that someone "downvoted" i.e. ignored. It would be interesting actually to give posts a rating rather than upvote only. So like when you mouse over it comes up with 5 stars, and you can set your upvote rating to anywhere between the 5 stars. In the end you see the average ratings. That would be pretty useful I think.
But definitely I applaud someone thinking up ways to discourage downvoting save for actual abuse of the system, or awful behaviour. It's the same on Reddit but people do use the downvote button as a "disagree" button. Upvote isn't meant to be flat out agreement either, but a blanket "this is a good post, it added something worth thinking about to the discussion" whether you personally agreed with it or not. I'd say upvoting the posts/comments you felt compelled to comment on is good form, as by your own admission it's worth saying something about / in response. Unless you hate it and want to trash it lol.