We use steemauto.com for our curation group. Then manually curate via the 5 curators we have.
I usually read someone's entire post before I curate it.
Personally for my account(truthforce) I have it follow the Informationwar curation trail on Steemauto at 100%, because I usually browse/read everything from the informationwar account anyway.
We are totally open to using a service that is better and I actually have some ideas on what such a site would need. I have suggest improvements for Steemauto before but they were not implemented.
Autovoting is helpful to lend automated support to a group or community, like IW. But even then, I like to apply a % I want, and I don't agree with all the votes given by IW curators at times, and don't vote at all. I've seen some 3 paragraph posts, or some things that were bleh... and everything gets the same vote applied, right?
How I see it for the IW is that we want to get a lot of people involved in it. The majority of things that go trending on reddit/twitter/facebook aren't very long usually, but can get a ton of people talking about something important. Every post someone makes is more information stored onto a blockchain(text at least is), and I think that as long as that post is IW related it should get some kind of upvote. With the overall goal being that we are creating a library that people are contributing into that would be very hard to delete.
For shorter "ok quality" posts it is supposed to be a lower vote. Longer posts that are quality should get like 20% to 25% usually.
It really depends, it could be a long post that isn't the best quality and that could get 10%. A long great quality post could get up to 20% to 25%. Or we could be at 100% Voting Power like we are right now, and I am going to upvote stuff with a larger upvote than normal to drain it down a bit so the 100% isn't wasted. Sometimes nothing gets curated because it just happens to be the 5 curators are busy at the same time.
I personally don't agree with everything that we curate either. There have been a few times where I took back something that was curated due to the nature of the content and past history with trolls/bad actors who we upvoted. For the most part the curators have the discretion, but they do have guidelines.