Although I do think it’s possible the Forum shouldn’t let you change away from those defaults.
I am in favor of these defaults and also in favor of disallowing people to change them. I know of two people on LW who have admitted to strong-upvoting their comments, and my sense is that this behavior isn’t that uncommon (to give a concrete estimate: I’d guess about 10% of active users do this on a regular basis). Moreover, some of the people who may be initially disinclined to upvote themselves might start to do so if they suspect others are, both because the perception that a type of behavior is normal makes people more willing to engage in it, and because the norm to exercise restrain in using the upvote option may seem unfair when others are believed to not be abiding by it. This dynamic may eventually cause a much larger fraction of users to regularly self-upvote.
So I think these are pretty strong reasons for disallowing that option. And I don’t see any strong reasons for the opposite view.
This seems like an important point, especially vis-à-vis Bostrom’s own views about the importance of global governance in ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’. Worth also noting that the League of Nations was created after WW1.