I think we can all agree that people rarely curate content anymore. Unfortunately the hard work of manual curation has been overtaken by automated curation. The more manual curation we have the better for everybody, I because, because we can build up the minnows producing good content and they in turn can do the same in the future.
Unfortunately even automatic curation (sort of like patreon style) is shrinking, not that I was a big proponent of that thus always curated manually as the users on auto often started abusing it with more posts and lower quality long term.
For new people too, I believe all the bot replies are insulting. I want to welcome them with a manual reply based on what they posted specifically. It's a bit depressing that a new and promising user usually gets a ton of bot replies and only a couple real people's replies. It's something I enjoy doing though, and I'll continue to manually hunt for quality people to support and help!