travelfeed and steemitworldmap are worth using if they are relevant. I'll use whatever incentives are available to me, and after all they are looking for good posts and more than often they notice me.
These two give me a significant chunk of my votes quite often, and I love them for it.
I'm fortunate to have a few good people supporting my posts, so I'm not reliant on such services. I'm still happy to get their votes of course. I just wish these came with some real engagement. Often you don't get any more than an automated comment. I prefer readers to a load of 'dust' votes.
While travelfeed comments are generic, they are never automated - we are reading every post manually and sometimes leave a comment with our personal accounts - but leaving genuine comments for 30-50 posts is not possible and also not the purpose of travelfeed. Being featured by @travelfeed comes with a resteem to one of the biggest travel-interested follower bases on Steemit - we can't force interaction, but we give featured authors the opportunity to reach a large follower base, but it is upon them to get these readers to interact, for example by using a catchy caption, an outstanding thumbnail or a call to interaction at the end of the post, there are many ways.
While curie can be super motivating, it should be seen as a boost to get started on Steem, not as a permanent support. Apart from that - with all the curied posts I see in #travelfeed, I believe that we are not the only curators looking through the tag ;)
I just wonder if we need some other form of curation. If it's not encouraging interaction, then it's not really working. It's not just about the money.
No curation project can force interaction and that's also not the task of a curation project - instead, curation enables authors to reach interested readers, encouraging interaction is the task of the author
I think I'm somewhere in the middle steeve, too new to know the old crew, and too big for @curie. There's a response on the post, it's good info.