While the debate on this topic is long and extensive (and easily searchable) I want to rather highlight a strategy here that might be useful to some of you that haven't used them in combination.
Combining both is very helpful as you get the benefits of autovoting which makes use of your voting power so it is never idle and manual voting which is great for voting on topics that you discovered and want to reward. Using only one strategy can be problematic as for autovoting one does not use one's brain (i.e. proof of brain) which can lead to people getting rewarded on a longer time frame that shouldn't have been receiving rewards. Only using manual voting, on the other hand, is very laborious if one wants to use one's voting power to the fullest (i.e. voting power can easily be at 100% for a while when you are not active or e.g., on vacation).
So after experimenting around with both methods, I am quite happy with this following method: I am using autovotes (through the app hive.vote) to reward the users that I am following on Hive (they can be added as a "fanbase" on that site) as these users have generally "passed" my test for good content (obviously this is highly subjective, but there are still objective means for discernment, e.g., creativity, skill, effort etc.). The higher your HP, the lower you generally want to set your vote distributions. For example, I am voting on all of my fanbase at a weight of around 15%. The secret is to have a cut off point at around 90-95%. This means that hive.vote stops distributing autovotes when your voting power dips below it. Be careful that you only distribute so many votes that on a 24h basis your voting power regenerates enough so it actually recovers to that cut off point. You have to experiment with this a bit, but roughly speaking one has about 10-12 available votes that can be cast at 100% in a day.
The good part in using autovotes with this configuration is that one always has enough voting power to distribute enough votes through manual voting. I am therefore using the remaining 85-95% voting power to vote on posts that I discover manually. I would recommend that you don't go too far under 85% as it then takes a whole day to recover to 95%, i.e. there won't be any votes cast on your fanbase. But obviously this varies on a daily basis when e.g., one finds really good content and uses more of one's voting power or one is absent for some days and the voting power sits at the cut off point.
Don't forget that you are also voting automatically in communities with tokens that you accumulate. For example, if you have 100 PoB tokens (powered up) you are voting with that stake on people's posts in the PoB community. A really useful addition is to use a vote weight multiplier if your Hive and community accounts are not separated. This means that voting e.g., with 10% on a Hive front end means that if a vote multiplier is set to 2 your vote strength will be 20% in that community.
Hope this is helpful!
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