I try to do a mixture of both. I have some autovotes for sure, but I also do a lot of manual curation. I think what really separates the two is the number of comments. If you look at my account you will see that there are a ton of comments. I know there are a lot of whale accounts that just auto vote and never comment, but comments are where the real communities are built I think. I guess I feel I can justify my use of autovoting because I am still actively participating on the chain via comments and some manual curation. If I were just autovoting and not commenting, then it might be a different story. The two really go hand in hand for me.
I have nothing against people using autovotes if they're "active", as this will mean they'll notice if some of their votes have been cast on content they wouldn't agree with any longer being rewarded. Main issue is those who set things up and go AFK, over time if they checked back in and noticed that there's this new thing now that if you delegate to this project you're getting a lot more APR than the usual 8.5% you've been used to, and if that APR is coming from outside and through projects doing things manually, keeping authors in check, making sure it takes more effort to earn Hive, etc, it's all a win for everyone involved in my opinion.
I know many active members who do great autovoting/hybrid voting as well, some times I may notice a vote on some authors I don't agree with and see that they've been lacking in content/quality/engagement/effort for a while I may ask them to reconsider, if they don't then you know there's always downvotes in the extreme cases but most of the time it doesn't come to that. Other times I see it and I have no other option than to downvote cause the autovoters aren't reachable anywhere.
Yeah, those are some really good points. The benefits of delegation these days are a far cry from where they were when I first started on here five years ago. So many options with great manual curation efforts. The sad thing is, I look at my rewards sometimes and think if it weren't for autovotes, I wouldn't be getting anything. I don't feel that my content is low quality or phoned in either. It's just a matter of catching the right eyes I guess.
I felt like that at one point with the exception of the people running the communities I posted the content in. The only thing that I was able to do to fix it was start commenting and upvoting on quality content of a lot of small accounts. Over time, that gave me more new connections - and more human beings actually reading my posts, which was the point of writing them.
Yeah, I do my fair share of commenting. I think I hit something like 37,000 the other day. I got an alert from the system.
That's more than I have! I'd hoped to hit 20k by January but it just didn't happen 😢 I need to learn how to live without sleep!!!
I don't recommend that at all, you will burn out for sure. Just take your time, you will get there.
It doesn't burn me out, I love the comments :) It's just finding the time to do as much as I'd like, plus improve my writing skills...
Thanks so much for the encouragement :)