There is often an argument among new Steem users that manual curation is dead - the whales who hold large amounts of SP either don't curate, circle vote or delegate to bid bots. Manual curation is at the strongest point I have seen during my six or so months on the Steem blockchain.

I wrote recently about how bid bot usage has been falling for some time and what this means for Steem.

First, lets look at some of the great manual curation services doing an excellent job spotting and rewarding underrated content and then explore other ways in which content is being curated on the Steem blockchain.

Cuartion Services

Curie

@curie is one of the oldest manual curation services on the Steem platform, and has been around through the time when there was rampant bid bot abuse. Their aim is to reward 'underrated' and quality content. Curie has a number of manual curators who are searching for great content that has been unrecognized, or undervalued. Curators follow strict guidelines, and then posts are upvoted accordingly. One criterion is that the post must be 'undervalued', and this means in terms of $ value, and so posts that have had a lot of paid votes are generally ignored. This is one of the reasons that my ideas about bid bots started to change. I have had a few upvotes from Curie and they can range anywhere from $2 to $40+

Asapers

@asapers is another manual curation service with a similar mission to curie, and run by the great community-minded steemian @hitmeasap. Asapers hunts for underrated posts and shares them in their 'EXTRA EXTRA, READ ME A.S.A.P!' posts, offers upvotes and shares some of the rewards of these posts with the featured authors. I have been curated by @asapers a couple of times and they are a great team of steemians.

The Luv Bug

@theluvbug is one of the newer curation services on Steem. To 'nominate' your post for curation you simply use the tag #theluvbug, and you might get a resteem or even an upvote!

Dapps getting in on the curation game

Along with some of these great curation services there are now several dapps that are using their delegation to reward their users for their content. @musing is a great example of this. Musing recently got a 1 million SP delegation, and have been using this to upvote users of their dapp. Musing is a decentralized version of Quora, where users are rewarded for providing questions and answers. Yes all curation of Musing is done manually.

@actifit also offers its users benefits for using their service, such as upvotes on @actifit posts, and issuing of actifit tokens. If you aren't aware, Actifit is a fitness tracker, where users are rewarded for using, sharing and delegating to Actifit. Actifit has a formula for how big an upvote users get based on several factors, such as their delegation amount, their activity level among other factors. @actifit are strong on finding and blacklisting users who try and 'game the system', just using the dapp to farm upvotes. The @actifit team does an excellent job, incentivizing its users to use, share and delegate to their dapp.

What about curation trails, and auto votes?

Curation trails are a way of 'following' the curation of an account with a lot of SP, and thus gaining a bigger chunk of the curation for that post. It can be argued that in certain cases this does decrease manual curation, but if they are on a trail for a curation service such as @curie, then that 'under-rated' post will just get a bigger payout, which I think is a good thing!

Autovotes are another area in which it could be argued that takes awy from manual curation, and yes I agree with this. However, I would say that the majority of the people who use autovotes are smaller accounts, or accounts that simply don't have access to Steem for a period of time. In this case it is probably better that these accounts are voting for something, rather than just staying at 100% voting power!

Conclusion

Along with the various curation services, such as @curie, @asapers, and @theluvbug, there is also a move towards dapps having large delegation and using their delegation to reward their users. I think that manual curation is stronger than it has been in a long time on the Steem blockchain

What do you think, is manual curation still alive and well on Steem? Is there other curations services that deserve a mention here?

I will be adding a 1 Steem bounty to this post, so that great commennts dont go unrewarded!