Some thoughts on curation in the wake of steemvoter.com downtime.
Yes that's right, we broke steemvoter.com - Clearly there are too many of us who are too lazy seek excellent content and thus are resorting to a vote-bot to curate for us.
Is it a case of laziness though, or are we community building, brick by brick?
In the beginning
When I started out on Steemit.com without friends already present and without a follower to my name, my vote didn't even change the reward total displayed when the up-vote button changed colour.
Is this actually working?!
I'm jumping ahead to say that things are a bit different at present with the delegated SP I am very fortunate to have, I can give a vote worth about 7$ in Steemit interface money, which is something like $15 liquid (SBD) and $15 STEEM after curation is removed and at today's prices. Woop!
I feel this is a really decent sum of money to be able to gift to a piece of content - I'd like to be able to be able to give that vote out 1000's of times a day!
Anyway, we aren't all Steem millionaires (yet) and so we have to start small, and slowly build up our Steem Power, our friends, and communities.
And so, as I started to gain Steem Power (SP) and followers, and produce content on a regular basis, I began noticing the same names appearing in the voters list. Of course, this is super easy to do when you less than 20 votes on a piece of content, as was the case for months and months for me personally.
These regular votes, and blog commentators, provided huge encouragement for me to carry on with my content creation, and the 'grind'. That's not my word, it has just been passed down from hard-working Steemian, to hard-working Steemian. Because hard work it is, and hugely time-consuming it can be.
As I looked at these voters with heart-felt admiration (for 10 minutes per voter), I remembered that they may have a blog too! Best go check their feed and see what the deal was with regards to their content...
The weeks passed, and this cycle of posting and doing the rounds of visiting my supporters and other interesting content was taking longer and longer.
More votes were arriving, and the network of people who's content/interactions I enjoyed soon got bigger than what I could hold in memory. So about 12 names, or was it 11....
After a little while
I reached the point where my following list was no longer manageable and it was at around 200 or so accounts - it's over 1000 these days. I thought 'i'll create another list', and use a list of bookmarks to manage who I visit, and that list quickly became too long also.
As this point though, I'd reached 20/30 users I felt a connection with - I liked their content, and I liked how they presented themselves on the platform.
It is here where I openly admit to supporting good content, as much as good followers, and as much as good people trying their best for themselves and the community.
And so to help me curate as I thought would please me the most, I chose a vote-bot ensure that i'd reach a person even if I was away for a weekend, or just didn't have any time for a day or two.
I wanted to provide continual encouragement to help them want to stick around, even if I was unable to comment or choose the exact vote weight I thought the content deserved.
I think I started at 50-100% weight all for the accounts listed in Steemvoter, and I think the first account I added was 
As the number of accounts I added to the list increased, the weight applied to each vote had to be decreased. Luckily we've had a nice rise in the price of STEEM, and I received some delegation, which have together made my vote of 100% back in June, the same as a 2% vote today. (Wow!)
A few days before steemvoter.com went offline (which I think was Monday), I purchased the premium package which increased the limit of 50 accounts you can vote for, to something like 500.
Yes that's right. A just turned 'dolphin' status user has 50 accounts that they auto-vote for. And, I still have voting power spare each day to support interactions on my blogs, introduce/support new users, and pick out one of two excellent pieces of content to give a larger vote to.
The key point for me is that I always keep spare voting power no matter how big my auto-vote list becomes. This 'left-over' SP is what I use for new users, great content, and to stop myself falling into the 'silo-voting' trap that others have succumbed to.
I think it is also worth mentioning that I don't expect killer curation rewards for the accounts I set auto-votes for. The reward is for those guys.
And now
Currently, it's 90% manual voting for me, as I have found steemdunk.xyz to help out a little this week. (20 votes free)
What I have been doing is giving bigger votes to what catches my eye in my feed, and looking out for good intro posts, but then I think about why I support some people unconditionally. They have helped me, they are paying bills with SBD, they have given a lot of time and effort and should be helped in return.
So to answer the question in the title of this blog:
Manual curators, I salute you!
Manual curation, particularly by large SP account holders, is a like a job. And indeed, 
100% Auto-voters, meh.
Sorry, you've reached Silo land. New content, new users, will drive the platform forward, and you should try to keep any eye out for this.
Mixed-mode works
Users who mix autos to support their community with manual votes to support new users and excellent content, I also salute you.
As long as I can manage my vote power to allow curation of great content, build communities, support new users, then I am happy to classify myself as a mixed-mode curator.
And so I ask: How do you, do yours? (Curation, that is!)
Are you missing SteemVoter? Or would you not be seen using such evil machinery! (and why?)
Thanks for reading my ramblings, hopefully I shall see you in my comments :)
Asher 