Why upvote automatically?
I have mixed feelings about automatic voting.
Why should I offer automatic upvotes to a user that can disappoint me although I usually like his/her content? But is it right that I don't upvote the content from a user that I appreciate because I'm away from the laptop for a few days?
I think the bots made more sense before the 7 day payment period was implemented. Now I have more time to read posts of the users I follow and decide if I want to upvote them.
For this reason, I decided to go slow on bot assignment. I'm still fast at removing bots whenever I lose interest in someone's content but from now on I'll be more selective on assigning bots.
Oh... and I'll share with the community whenever I assign a bot to a user.
I'm not a whale, so this isn't a valuable trophy but here it goes:
my new bot goes to...
@marketreport
I've been reading most of Gregory Mannarino's posts and there's not one I disliked. His analysis are clear and I learn a lot reading his content. I've upvoted every post I read. I believe he adds value to Steemit and that's why I decided to 'offer' him a bot.
RMach
Your article goes kind of to a question I wrote about yesterday. I have had a bit of success with a couple posts. But from the look of it not many actually read it. Which honestly was more what I cared about. And some posts that have made nothing have had plenty of views and a good few comments. But those people do not upvote. I am still learning but don't get that trend at all.
I can relate. I've had posts with good rewards but few views which is odd and feels strange especially if the post is about asking for help or opinions. To ban the entire bot thing would solve this.
From my experience, the contrary may happen when people engage in interesting discussions and forget to upvote or more frequently when people read your post, disagree and use the comment section to express their opinion.
I never understood the concept. Is it supposed to be a way to collect curation rewards?
It's one of the consequences, yes. Usually you upvote manually and collect the curation rewards. This is an automatic way to do it. On one hand it's a way to reward people that usually produce good content even if you're not able to read it. On the other hand, some abuse the system by setting bots only for profit via curation rewards. I think it's a useful tool but at the same time I feel it's wrongly used by many