I broke down and set up Steemvoter. I resisted this for a long time, mostly on "principal", slightly on laziness.
For any who aren't aware, Steemvoter is a very user-friendly "curation bot" that allows you to setup simple rules to vote automatically on selected bloggers you support (up to 500). It's free if you give up a vote each day, or you can pay $3 SBD per month. They have live Discord support that is high-quality.
Unfortunately, I'm of the opinion automatic curation is done mostly to maximize curation rewards, and therefore contributes greatly to the "votes on, but doesn't read or even view the content" "problem". It's definitely related to the larger problem of the curation formula rewarding dog-piling popular authors regardless of quality, an issue I've written at length about.
I have drafts of unpublished posts on how auto-voting is bad for Steemit, but realized they were ultimately pointless to publish. You can't stop auto-voting anymore than you can stop all scripting/botting. Particularly with open-source software, it may not even be technically possible to stop auto-voting, relegating potential countermeasures to manual witch-hunting. Steemvoter is also clearly a popular service, and I don't like imposing values on others, generally speaking.
Perhaps more importantly, I think auto-voting, if it is a problem at all, may be the symptom rather than the cause.
Furthermore, I have been benefitting rather substantially from the support of a number of auto-voters, and it was difficult to reconcile the fact that my blog runs (mostly) on auto-voters most days with my inability to return that support manually. Ultimately, there are simply too many worthy bloggers and supporters of my blog for me to ever keep up with.
Doing so manually, though excruciating, was at one point at least feasible. I was able to do a D+ job at it in between my articles, replies, and the supplemental Steemit communities I try to help/participate in (MSP, SPL, SFT.)
Of course, that was before Steemit became a pile of goopy molasses. Now that consistent post/vote/comment deletion appears to be the temporary norm, it has become impossible to keep up. Busy's lack of a comment feed makes voting and replying to all comments a huge pain, and Steemit's non-stop transaction errors have done the same.
In other words, I give up trying to get to everyone manually. I can't keep up anymore.
I have 40-50 people that have graced me with their auto-vote. In looking at each and every blog of everyone who has voted for me recently, few if any are unworthy of some votes in return.
This task required creating a (color-coded) spreadsheet and looking at the posting frequency of all my voters and commenters - a task which I suggest everyone do if they are setting up Steemvoter themselves. Fro me, it took the better part of this last week, and even so, I will need to scale up my vote percentages over time as I see how accurately I calculated the average posts per day of each user, and how many users stick to their recent trends in that regard.
So, there you have it. That's my "excuse" for any 1-2% votes you might get from me in the near future. I had to add over 200 users to my rule-list just to try and get the best portion rewarded. I still have many more users to add, so if I missed you, my apologies. Hopefully it's coming. I will also monitor voting usage for over-allocations (overuse) and reassign those back to the group.
There is even one frequent commenter out there with a blog that is kicking butt, and they'll be seeing a 100% upvote, at least as long as my power and their post frequency makes possible. I will scale up everyone else, relative to their post quality, as my voting power allows.
Thanks to all my followers, and any troopers who made it through the last ~13 paragraphs!
Also, quick shout-out to the Steem Voter support team, who were very quick and helpful in resolving an issue with my account.
PS - I'd like to digress briefly here and state that I only slightly took curation rewards into account when setting up my autovoter (mostly in adjusting timings). I chose to setup auto-vote rules for those I want to support due to quality content or their previous support, not to increase my rewards earned. I actually gave larger rewards, relatively speaking, to those authors who were undervalued (which runs counter to maximizing curation reward, currently.)
If you have any additions or errata for this post, please let me know! I will see that they are voted to the top of the comments, and will make the appropriate edits (if possible).
We also have a Radio Station! (click me)
...and a 4800+ user Discord Chat Server! (click me)
Sources: LA.gov
Copyright: SearchEngineLand.com, Steemvoter, Memecrunch