You start with the premise that not-voting is bad for the community. I think that premise is wrong.
The value of an upvote is based on three things: The HIVE POWER in the account, the price of HIVE and the rewards pool. See Upvote Calculator
The size of the rewards pool is listed on HiveBlocks.com as well. Right now it is 830,544 HIVE ≈ $208,466 (I think this is for a full week).
As I understand, when people upvote, they end up taking a percent of this rewards fund, which lowers the rewards fund.
Conversely, when people don't upvote, they don't take funds from the rewards pool and the upvote grows for the rest of us.
I remember there being an event which made it difficult to upvote.
The rewards pool grew dramatically and all of our upvotes were worth more.
The same thing happened after the hard fork. There were many accounts that stopped voting on Hive and some that stopped voting on STEEM. This made the rewards pool increase which increased the value of our individual upvotes.
A person who doesn't vote is not hurting pool. A person who doesn't vote leaves money in the rewards pool which increased the value of human votes.
I personally dislike Curation Trails. i decided to upvote this post. I upvoted just after 5 minutes.
Since you have a legion of robots that upvote your post exactly 5 minutes after posting; my upvote will get very little in the way of a curation reward.
IMHO, since the curation trails are automated upvotes, they reduce the quality of the curation on HIVE. The curation trails mindlessly harvest the rewards pool making manual curation less effective.
Good point. Thanks for sharing your opinion too!
As much as I enjoyed this article - and I did - but I really liked this response and the rational behind it. Are you still active on here? I'm assuming so but the latest thing I think I saw was like 3-4 months ago.
Fantastic response.