Hey @whatsup, it's the first time I come upon one of your posts, I believe, so I gave you a follow :)

I completely agree with your points. There are too many upvote bots out there and automated curation systems to justify that change as better for everyone. As someone who has grown organically in the last year, I've seen how it can be so rewarding just to curate and post with human interaction without the use of any bots of that nature. Human curators are different, you tag them and they see valuable content and help people get noticed. Bots and automated curation systems don't see the quality of the content. They don't see the difference between my smoothie post or my videos. Someone who wants to upvote certain posts, by being there humanly and physically, they can select what content to upvote. They have freedom of choice.

One thing I've mentioned before and I'll say again here, I think a better solution would be to increase the amount of upvotes allocated at 100% curation. With only 5 upvotes, a lot of people don't know if they should upvote or not. That being said, I'm the kind of person who just upvotes posts I like at 100% ALL THE TIME and then comments I enjoyed at 25%, typically. I will upvote until I am down to 0% some days, if I am very active, because no matter the value of my upvote, I want those people to know that I upvoted their content because I found value in it. But a lot of people conserve their upvotes, which is understandable. With more upvotes at 100%, and THEN more upvotes per each percentage, people will be more incentivised to give out more upvotes, to curate more, as opposed to being stingy. The solution IMO is not to give more of the payout to the curators. That just takes away from content creators, and then who's going to want to keep creating content that has value, other than people like you and me. Most people will resort to spam or just post random pics with no great effort (not talking about photography posts) and just share anything, really, while those who post valuable content will suffer. And once again, the bots will win.

That's my take on it, anyway.