When I first started blogging on hive, I had joined some curation trails for communities I was involved in. In one case, a lot of the content was simply giveaways, and I didn't like seeing my upvote used that way, so I quit using all of the different curation trails for that reason, and for other reasons. This is not to knock curators that do the curating in general, it just ended up being rather like a combination of voting non-quality content (giveaways that don't provide original/interesting content) and vote trading if these trails upvoted my content. To their credit, some of the curators running curation trails do a darn good job of managing what content they upvote, and it can be a good thing for content providers. However I prefer to do my own curating now, and I frequently, but not always, leave a comment with the poster to engage in dialog.
good article, and I appreciate your thoughts on here. Hive blogging is still a learning experience for me and many others. Thanks for sharing.