I've been having some mixed conversations about Curation Trails lately. For those of you unfamiliar with this:
The website www.Streemian.com created by 
[Image from Streemian.com]
-it feels automated
-gives false active user statistics
-many might not vote on the post after seeing it already having received many votes, although value is still low
Like many decentralized innovations lately, there are both ways to abuse/misuse the nature of it and anonymity gives certain foul players a layer of safety to do so. But most of the time, the pros will outweigh the cons and people won't mind the small % of bad apples compared to the bigger picture.
To demonstrate the pros of voting trails, I'll just write down a list of all things that come to mind and you the reader can decide if the pros outweigh the cons in this matter.
Active and trusted voters of the community, independent of the amount of SP they control have a bigger role in voting forward content and filtering it out from the less quality posts
Quality is often subjective, but there are a variety of Trails you can join such as 
Users who are very busy or other work aren't often able to actively vote on the platform, doesn't mean they don't believe in the platform and don't want it to succeed. They can instead join a Trail and let other users in the community vote more often and provide a general balance in the rewards of contributing users.
Thus creating a win-win situation, the authors and content-creators less often have their contributions missed/filtered out in the spam/invisible from other users while the investors still actively voting on them and keeping the ecosystem of Steem and SteemDollar flowing. You could also say its a win-win-win with the last one being the platform and its future.
Let's say I have 500k SP after my votes. I notice a new user A has made an introduction post 2 hours ago, it has gotten 3 votes and is valued at 0.01$. The intro post had a lot of effort put into it, seemed genuine and got missed by many readers early. Knowing the amount of weight my votes have, I would give this post ~10% vote with the intent of user A's post getting some sort of visibility if you scroll down "Hot" list or just the "New" list and see it has gotten some value and raises some interest to the other readers. Some readers may also enjoy it and then Connections/Follows occur naturally, giving the author a small reward so they can verify this isn't "fake" money, and giving them an opportunity to connect to other users and easier access information about getting started as a content provider.
Voting trails take un-used Voting Power, turns it into a win-win situation for both parties, but also gives me a bigger incentive to curate better and improve the quality of the platform with others feedbacks through voting over time.
For instance, if I notice that some of my votes have not received many votes after it, you start to notice patterns over time and with the community slowly move into a "better quality" content agreement. This is something that happens naturally and is relevant to "Survival of the Fittest"
As a former really active Redditor I am a prime example of moving to social platforms that provide a better quality. From Facebook/Instagram to Youtube then to Reddit and now to one which I personally believe will incentivize content to become greater than we could have imagined before. While giving the creators 100% of the value they deserve and dividing it among any trend/tag or interest that appeal to the majority.
Hope to hear some of your thoughts on voting trails, if you feel like joining one I still have invite keys left to give to Streemian.com, feel free to DM me on steem.chat for more information.
