Just cause you asked them in one post and knowing you all are connected through Discords etc doesn't mean they've mainly been manually curating. You literally tagged them all as well, naturally many will come out and say it was manual to help you and your narrative out. Considering the lack of engagement in general most of these authors the same curators vote it's hard to imagine it's all manual votes after having read the posts but not taken an extra minute to leave a comment which they literally are incentivized to do since comment voting exists as well.
Autovoting is a big reason to farmy content, lazy curation on same authors constantly and overrewarding because the votes are often the same no matter what the content because they don't read them. You can't dispute this fact. You also can't keep trying to defend it as "they just want to support them because x/y when most these authors do is just cross-post their content and the voters close to never tip or use recurring payments to want to actually support and the content to continue to occur out of sheer interest of consuming it on Hive. It's just blanket statements for wanting said upvotes to continue to get a big chunk of the reward pool for a niche that is very small on the internet in general and only now is gaining more traction due to all this covid misinformation, monetization and fearmongering from spinning articles and posts from reddit and other places in your own words just to make money. Naturally this is your main reason for doing it, knowing jamesc and xeldal are supporters of such content and expecting to maximize their influence on the rewardpool without any disagreement in the way and when that happens you all lash out as proven time and time again.