How embarrassing is it to see your one liner post earn 50$/HIVE?
That depends a lot on the person posting, and his/her followers. Although I have auto votes on my account, I don't particularly like them and consider that if everyone would curate manually there would be much more interaction, probably more traffic as well, and the variety of creators getting curated would also be wider. I doubt though that Hive will ever ditch auto votes so I got at peace with the idea. The only plus for them is that in case of users not opening Hive daily to curate they can rest assured that their HP won't be wasted. Other than that I don't see too many reasons why we need auto votes. It's probably that I'm old school but, I like doing things organically more than I like automation.
This is what I held in mind while writing the post - they'll always be here, and I don't think we need to hate them either (passive investors have their worth!), but we certainly can make it more fun for active users.
Me too and I'll never become a 'good curator' in the sense that I'll have the best ROI but I like voting and picking the percentage each time :D (Although sometimes late at night I'll just vote people on 50% or so because I need to sleep, lol!)