Let us talk about curation trails and voting

When I first started in Steemit I did not know about Voting power, Voting weight, curation rewards, and communities. What I did was spend a lot of time following people that I like then going through my follow feed and upvote posts that I like. This resulted in me voting for a lot of posts to the point that my vote did not have value.

Then in one post by a Steemian he said that people should efficiently use their VP and make use that it never reaches 100% or have it below 85%. I remember how smug I was and answered that I don't care about caring if my vote had value or not, it was my way of extending my support to the author that I liked his/her post. The author replied if your vote value when you upvote a post would be at 0.0001 do you think that you give value to his/her work? A post that person may have made for over an hour are you rewarding it properly? Are you giving proper love when your voting power is so low that your upvote is negligible?

From Unsplash - Tim Marshall

I was taken aback as in my mind it does make sense that if I worked hard for something I would want some value to an upvote. This is not a scarcity mindset. This is about rewarding people what is due to their hard work.

So I always check my voting power now either in Steemd.com or in Steemnow,com. I make sure that I don't go below 70% of my voting power so that I can always provide the best value I can give to posts that I like.

As I learned more, I learned about curation rewards, front running big upvotes to maximize your curation rewards and I learned a lot in The Curation and Engagement Leagues - Sponsored by @carlgnash and @paulag! by @abh12345

My general views on curation rewards (to score highly in League 1) are:

• Vote before the big hitters, but not too early!
• Voting in the first minute will earn you a curation reward of almost 0.000
• Voting between 1 and 29 minutes will earn an increasing % of the curation rewards split - This value peaking at 30 minutes and remaining the same from this point onwards
• It is commonly suggested that 15-25 minutes is the 'best' time to vote, especially on known 'power author' posts because they are likely to have more auto-votes coming in at these times - and you want to be ahead of these votes
• Voting on good dtube/dlive/sndbox content, and utopian-io approved contributions (prior to the vote by @dtube / @utopian-io, etc) can earn some very good curation rewards
• Voting on @ocd posts is likely to gain good curation rewards as founder @acidyo, and @anomadsoul support these posts after giving time for other accounts to vote - you will be in front of a couple of large votes here!

As you can see, a combination of many variables such as Steem Power, voting strength, voting weight, time of vote, and more, all play a part in the amount of rewards received.

So I look out for good content creators and help in submitting it in the potentials room in @promo-mentors

Then I learned how to make use of Curation Trails and Autovotes were good ways to make sure that I was maximizing my votes was not sitting idly and also to support some communities that I support like @thesteemengine and @promo-mentors because I trust that the posts that they will upvote will be of good quality.

This helped me in getting to 700+ upvotes made. Although I manually curate a lot it still also helps if you have a trail. You can check yours in this awesome tool by @ura-soul in Steemocean.com

Lately I have been thinking though of our dependence on Auto voting and curation trails. Certainly, it is understandable when we really can't spend 8-16 hours in Steemit and manually curate everything.
Yet when does automation become bad for the platform?

I was thinking as I observed that I am getting 50-150 votes and about 10-40 comments on my posts depending on the topic. A large part of the votes is from autovoters and some from curation trails. I am not complaining and I am very thankful for the upvotes but would also want to know if they really liked what I wrote or are they just after curation rewards.

Comments would be good as well. Although I have to admit that I don't comment on all posts that I vote as well maybe due to lack of time or that I can't add any comment of value to the discussion. I don't really want to leave a "Good Post" comment and appear spammy haha.

My fear would be there might be a time that posts will not have comments and all with be just auto votes and curation trails. I see these now in a lot of posts that gets curie and OCD votes. Let us not even get to posts that were just bid bot voted because they are just normally bot comments of votes.

Then there was the abuse that certain curation trails that happened which was brought up when it seemed that curie was following a community vote on certain users that was posting some very low quality stuff. This was brought to their attention because curie stands for exceptional quality posts and although they did not have a direct hand on it but just name curie has a certain effect on people. They promptly investigated and removed the votes.

This also happened to a local community here in the Philippines that some votes were placed on just copy paste of some quotes. It was also investigated and reported.

Technology, I think is never inherently evil or abusive. It is the people that wield it that can make use of it for the good or for abuse.

I remember a comment left in a post of mine about redfishes that there should be a way that when someone upvotes a post then a comment is also needed. Although I think it is nice, it is not feasible for me.

What do you think? Is autovotes and Curation trails be stopped and we do manual curations? Will it be better for the platform?

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