As an afterthought, I think manual curators need to play the same curation-rewards game and thereby increase their own income and those of their favourite bloggers. It's easy now to optimise voting; if you have a batch of bloggers you like just auto-upvote them. Then add manual upvotes to either new authors or top-up your followed authors with comment-upvotes.
The more time-intensive manual curation work does not have to be less rewarding! Honestly.