[throwawaywego]

The opposite of extreme self-citing is self-plagiarism (either out of ignorance, to avoid extreme self-citing on ground-breaking research, or with malicious intent: passing the same paper to multiple journals as a new result).

> The rate of duplication in the rest of the biomedical literature has been estimated to be between 10% to 20% (Jefferson, 1998), though one review of the literature suggests the more conservative figure of approximately 10% (Steneck, 2000). https://ori.hhs.gov/plagiarism-13

If work by another author was enough to inspire you and add a reference, then your own previous work should certainly qualify, if it added inspiration to the current paper. Self-citing provides a "paper trail" for the reader when they want to investigate a claim or proof further.

(Like PageRank, it is very possible to discount internal PR/links under external links, and when you also take into account the authority of the referencer, you avoid scientists accumulating references from non-peer reviewed Arxiv publications).