I do some autovoting myself. They are people I want to make sure I don't miss upvoting. So, yes that is like a subscription. I put those people on my Gina notices and usually end up reading their posts. Not only because I want to see their work but I also want to not get into a situation where someone is getting a regular upvote and they start posting crap.
As for the whales, call me a cynic, I don't believe for a minute they will start doing more manual curation. It's time consuming and not a good use of their time and resources when they can make even more by delegating to bots. If you doubt that statement take a look at @rycharde's post https://steemit.com/delegators/@rycharde/an-analysis-of-50-curation-rewards-in-eip-and-hf21-all-delegators-should-read-this
He's done the math.
I sure don't doubt it.
The fact that they have the most to gain from a more popular blockchain doesn't seem to have impacted their short sighted behavior, so I doubt these changes will.
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