We introduced self-reply fee escalation to account for an exceptional poster who would self-reply in 3-5 comments to their many link posts with excessive context, ie non-discussion-eliciting comments. People would see their posts and think a discussion was happening, then navigate to see there wasn't a discussion in fact. This was back when many SN posts went uncommented on, thus they singlehandedly made comment count an unreliable signal.

That stacker has found greener pastures by the looks of it, so I'd be up for turning self-reply fee escalation off for OPs to see what it might be retarding.

As a non-writer that values writing, especially when it's done natively here, I'd love to support your writing experiment.