Interesting point made by coinlend! Anyone else with a opinion?

Doesn't make sense to disable. What would be the point to invest in Steem, if you can't push your articles higher up?
Upvoting comments is also important to get higher up from the crowd. 
I only agree of reducing the payouts when upvoting your own comments. 
Also, the idea that @crypto-investor mentioned building a penalty bot is really horrible, it's far better to just fix the platform.

First off, I believe just putting in the time to create any type of content (good or bad) deserves some sort of value. Who best to give that value than the person who did the work on the content. That said, instead of disabling, content creators should be incentivized by the system automatically upon putting something up in Steemit and the diminishing returns would take care of the spam. Actually, since not everyone can put up content consistently, the feature to put all your voting power into one Upvote is really important if you believe what you created, say for this month, really deserves it. Further incentives are then given by the community who finds the content 'valuable'.

It's a vicious cycle. If they disabled upvoting yourself, abusers would just create new accounts to vote for them. Then when you police having multiple accounts, abusers will collude with others to create accounts upvote you and split the profits. 

There is big money at stake. 1000s of dollars may not be much to you, but think of what it means to people in poor countries. Whales buy steem power and create sweat shops where the poor work 16 hours a day upvoting the whale and in return get paid pennies and die young. Allowing upvoting of yourself may not prevent sweat shops, but at least there is not much point in creating sweat shops when you can just upvote yourself.