Am I ruining my manual curation?

I got a @hivebuzz message the other day notifying me that I've reached a new milestone with the amount of votes cast at 115k. I used to be proud of that number cause with this account I've always curated manually.

Curation is such a word with many meanings on Hive, but what it meant to me and to this account was that I'd read or at least try to read the whole post, though I'd be lying I didn't some times not read all of it and some times just glance at the post before casting a vote. There's that reputation factor there, you don't have to read everything of a certain author in your feed to trust that he's not abusing Hive in any way at a certain point. Either way, the reason I liked the amount of votes I've cast is because I've also not missed many days of curation throughout my years on this chain, knowing they've all been manual, none been any of those small votes splattered all over the chain that some like to do, but each with some impact and strength behind it. So the author knew I've read the post and cast my vote and it having been done manual.

There's this thing with manual votes I've been thinking about lately, in some ways it's great, actually in many ways, but there are a few aspects of it you wish you did some auto votes or a hybrid version of it. Not many but those times you wish you had it set up that way really hurt after finding out certain things. There have been certain authors who I really enjoyed the content of and was happy to see them posting on Hive and welcomed them nicely with some votes early on and a follow. As time went on and they were authors who wouldn't post that often, only when they really had something amazing to show and the content took a long time to be created they would post. Due to me being stubborn about voting manually it just so happened that I'd miss them from my feed every now and then and when I'd look those authors up after some time wondering what happened I'd see them having posted a few more times after my upvotes, commented a bit here and there but then stopped which made me wonder that if I had autovotes on those certain authors, would they have continued posting? Would they have stuck around to find what else Hive has to offer them? Did my initial bigger upvotes discourage them when the upvotes stopped?

Curation has gotten a lot better these days and moments like those are why we at @ocd focus on newcomers and retention.

Lately I've been weakening the meaning behind my manual votes, they're still being done manual but I've shifted quite a lot of focus towards the @poshtoken comments to reward sharers with Hive rewards. The process is basically I go to the comments of the account and scroll all the way down to where I last was, give the tweets some time to age and then open 10-30 in new tabs and go through to see how the tweets did. As you can imagine with 300-500 daily tweets this is quite some work and might get quite dull at times as it is so repetitive. So over time you start getting a bit bored and tired and start just casting votes from the comments directly if you see a username that sounds familiar and you have a slight memory that he usually does well with his tweets.

It's something I realize needs to get done, though, because driving traffic to our front-ends which could result in new users from the twitter sphere is important for a social media platform trying to take over the evil giants. My question with the post title is that now, to be able to cover as many tweets as possible and maybe even give some "participation rewards" to certain accounts for trying, I've had to lower my upvotes quite a lot so my mana wouldn't get drained beyond the point of recovery. There was this one time I went through a whole week's worth of poshtokens in one day and my mana went from 90% to 12%. I've also delegated the stake of @ocdb while its powering down over to this account just to manage my voting power a bit better and make my 1-2% upvotes worth a bit more. (Don't worry, our payout bot notices the delegation and deduces it from the amount that ocdb gets from its stake so I'm not "cheating" delegators out of rewards this way, although I will have to undelegate it soon due to the powerdown needing a restart which won't let me delegate it back until it starts earning the HP yet again.)

Anyway, what I mean with weaken is that my amount of votes is now going up a lot faster than in the past and I'm one of those users who I usually didn't appreciate as they seemed to just spam the chain with tiny votes trying to cover as many users as possible. Or possibly just avoiding getting penalized if certain posts got downvotes or they just figured doing that gives them a higher APY, who knows. At the same time it has also cost the users I follow some curation by focusing on poshtoken. Dunno, just feels iffy to be doing 300+ votes per day even though I know that the outcome could be amazing if we had a lot more users sharing their content onto Twitter and due to the upvotes and the way they earn POSH tokens attempt to formulate their tweets properly to gain a wider reach which all results in more attention to Hive, of course.

I've also been thinking of a way to automate it, maybe instead of @poshtoken just autovoting content creators who have been curated and whitelisted who have _earned posh in the past is not enough. Maybe we could create a smart bot that would also upvote the comments depending on who the receivers of the rewards are and other factors in the equation such as maybe followers on Hive x followers on Twitter x amount of likes received x amount of retweets received x posh earned so far, etc. That'd be quite an equation and I wonder as I'm writing this if it's even possible or feasible, @rishi556 may start to hate me more soon as I've already made his life harder considering how complex posh has already become in the backend.

Maybe some of you reading this would have some cool ideas on how to automate that rewarding process? I also wonder if that would get the poshtoken account some more delegations in exchange for POSH, though I'm also wondering if we should tweak the way the issuance works to favor delegators a bit more as every hive/hbd it earns will stay with the account and only be used to further evolve and grow POSH.

Oh well, trying to post a bit more often now and this was something I had in mind today. Hope ya'll are doing well during these markets, I know it can be tough for many here and in general things are going well in your lives. I watched some football today and was surprised to see Arsenal lose. I'm kind of looking forward to the world of warcraft wrath of the lich king classic expansion to be released and might create some content around it. If I find the time for it of course as most other things I do is and will be surrounding Hive. That's how it is, though, I think there are more and more people figuring out that a lot of their daily lives and activities can be spent on Hive as there's a wide range of things one can do here nowadays. Although I some times wish me and others would spend less time on Discord and more time directly engaging with others on chain.

Anyway, chain you later!