RE: Thinking about the many faces of an upvote
Interesting post. I think people vote for different reasons. Some do it for attention, some for profit and others to show appreciation. I have used more automatic voting in the past with Steemvoter and Streemian, but I have cut right back on that. I even used to give myself an automatic vote, but I stopped that when I was doing much better from other people voting on my posts.
I have benefited from Paolo giving me an automatic vote. I'm grateful for that, but in general I think manual voting is best as it takes the quality of the post into consideration. I vary my vote according to what I think of the post. I also vote a lot on comments on my own posts and those of others. I think good comments need to be encouraged.
I don't worry about curation rewards as you need a lot of SP for that to be much. Okay, so I make something from curation, but I have no strategy and I make more from my own posts.
I think about bots since I started to blog here. Sure, they help to save time when you value an author or if you're an investor or other cases, at the end I think the difference is always on "how" we use a tool, not on the tool, but I've always prefer to search/read/upvote by myself from conte to content because so I feel myself more motivated to enjoy the community and to be a part of it and I can also "adjust" the % to try to value every content in the best way. Sure, I'm sorry to miss some nice contents from authors that I love, but I think is like an off line "community" where sometime we can meet our friends to drink something together and sometime we can't ^^
As you, I have no strategy for curation rewards and I make more from my own post (that it's also a more funny, interesting thing for me) ^^