I absolutely can see why people autovote and I appreciate receiving them as I'm no saint either :-) I just would LOVE to have people have to option to autovote be 'challenged' by making manual curation more fun by having randomized voting windows or easter eggs or even badges :-) There's a lot of engagement to get even from a voting perspective and in the end we want Hive to become as cool/fun/unpredictable as possible so we can have fun with it.
Your way of using autovotes reminds me of the good old RSS-reader by the way :D