Hi, I disagree with your idea here for reasons that were demonstrated in my post on this subject. I specifically asked my upvoters to comment as to whether they manually upvote or not. Many of the larger ones came forward to say that they manually curate and manually upvote - reading my posts and upvoting them because they like them. This fact was completely denied by the downvoters because it was inconvenient to their narrative. So, no, auto upvoting is not the cause of the issue - it is often just a convenient cover for other reasons that aren't expressed by the downvoters as they know they would lose face if they did actually state them publicly.