You may be right. But what if the curation trail is being manually created based on the quality of the comments (as it appears to be in this case), and as a result, the person whose auto-vote has been applied goes to look at those comments and adds some meaningful engagement (if appropriate)? Could that possibly be a good thing?
That's what i will be doing. See this comment to see an easy way to review the trail of upvotes on comments
RE: Is following a manually curated comment trail good for Hive?