Is using your little IOUs only to eat pie yourself an evil act?

It is not an evil act, evil is something else. But it is a decision that will make a project like the steem blockchain unsustainable in the long term.

This place is supposed to be driven by content that gets rewarded according to its quality.

I understand the urge of investors to monetize their investment in Steem, especially with the current low prices that must make them feel very discouraged. But ironically, that idea of maximizing their stake without sharing the votes with other people, will only make their investment go lower and lower as time pass because that attitude is not good for the health of this blockchain (in my opinion), making their apparent "solution" worse than the initial problem.

An easy way to see if something is sustainable in steem is to ask the following question:

• If everyone did X (X being anything from vote selling to self votes to curating, etc...), would steem make sense at all? would there be a reason to use the blockchain? would it have an opportunity to become broadly used by millions of people in the future?

If the answer is yes then whatever X is, it is sustainable.

If the answer is no, then whatever X is, it is unsustainable, and therefore, unhealthy for this blockchain.