Hi @brianphobos. I thought you might appreciate a reply. I am one of the ones with some auto votes on, I can only afford to do a few because my power gets drained pretty quickly and get left with upvoted worth nothing for thing I come across that I like. My husband on the other hand is pretty against bots and autovoting so he sticks to lovingly curating by hand. That means some days he is busy and doesn't vote at all. I suspect many 'genuine' users (i.e. those that are here for the community and the content) feel like that.
As for the uneven distribution... There are lots of cartels in here, a lot of people milk the bots to the tune of $600 or more per post... While others plod along with cents... Then there is the issue with curation rewards, some just upvoted certain people to milk the huge payouts...
I don't know what the solution will be, but we are all responsible and each person ends up making their mind up.
I personally bought Steemit with BTC profits and use bots to get a few dollars from each post, do a mixture of manual curation and automatic... Not getting very far so I dip in and out as life allows me to, but I can't see my future as a full time steemian, more of a gig on the side. That is my position, don't know if it is of any help to aid your understanding... Good luck!
Thank you for your response. Yeah 1 of the main concerns is certainly people just voting on the "safe" bet with their upvote bots. So if they vote on someone who they know will just post the same stuff all the time that they know will get a big payout then they could get the best curation reward. So suddenly the payouts can end up having nothing to do with "good content." That is subjective though obviously.
I'm not a very "safe" content creator to vote on because one minute I'm doing a meme, the next minute I'm playing basketball, then I'm talking about crypto currencies.....etc People don't like it if I say that some crypto currency is going lower...etc.
I do a lot of manual curation as well. I think the situation will get easier for me when my vote becomes worth a more tangible amount. Like if my vote was worth $10 then I could spread it out even more.
You bring up an interesting point. I typically set my autovotes for people who support me or people who I have some relationship with on here, however I can see someone just picking someone like @jerrybanfield because they know their posts will always earn alot