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I give maybe 2 manual votes a day, but I've never been one to manually curate. If I weren't in the trail I'd be selling my votes. Most of the time if I need to bulk upvote, I divide my vote and give 40% to each person, that way I can do like 6-7 and still share with my trails.

I'm also in other trails. I wouldn't know how to answer you. I'm always at around 93-96% (my lower limit on Steemauto is 93%), and I try never to go below 89% manually, and if I go to 89% I don't vote anymore that day unless it's absolutely necessary, and even then it's at most a 40% vote.

But anyway, I'm not one to curate. If that's your thing, evaluate how many votes you want to give a day to your curation efforts. I personally feel that at least 70% of my daily VP should go to my trails, and 30% back to people who comment on my posts and to the people I follow.

I echo your sentiment. I am on the trail, I give a couple upvotes here or there, but Im too busy to manually upvote regurlarly, at least this way my weight goes to work, and frankly I see nothing wrong with this compared to say selling my SP to SmartSteem... what's the difference? Nothing imo.