I agree only stacking for appreciation can be risky for investors. Due to sheer nature of cryptocurreny, they fluctuates a lot on tiny incidents. Investors/traders who are in for short-term, powering up STEEM can be painful since they cannot play along with Market. However, in long term it can be a different issue.

In Recent BTC's up-trending and ascending to $3500, STEEM seems to be lagging in big way or, having some negative perspective issue with investors since it is actually down to $1.16 while most of the top cryptos are ascending with BTC. I wonder if it is due to @dan powerdowning big number of STEEMs, concern on scalability, STEEM fork- calibrae, or recent downvoting and in-fighting among whales. I hope STEEM come back from this SLACK and have a positive correction i.e. at BTC $3500, STEEM could be $3.

For self-vote, I would put the discretion to the owner. It takes precious time to read article and create intelligent comment. Just waiting on gracious peers to vote up or, sheer luck of visibility can be discouraging. If the writer thinks that he have put quite significant effort on writing or commenting, I don't see guilt in upvoting. However, self-upvoting in the purpose of self-voting with silly or generic comment should be deal with loathing. However, we can't stop people from manipulating the system in a decentralized world , we can make the system better to discourage or stop such behaviors.