People up voting their own post never really bothered me. If someone posted a bunch of things that clearly had zero effort and voted those up to high payouts then most of the community would be against that, but that's about it for me. I don't tend to get on the flagging for reward pool train.

I also understand up votes for visibility and often that takes just a few cents and I didn't really see people complaining about that.

Recently I've noticed trains of comments from some people that up vote all of their own comments apparently as high as they can. They sometimes don't even up vote the post they are responding to, they just dump all of the steem power into their own comments. It is not a sense of entitlement it is more a view that if we all chose to do that this would quickly become a rather unpleasant environment. It could potentially reduce attractiveness of steemit and by extension steem and that impacts all of our investment.

I am all for freedom, yet I am also against things that can give the platform significant negative PR.