I agree with your take, @fingersik. I really appreciate both having autovoters who support me, and the ability to autovote others. I don't have very many autovoters, but the few I do have value my content and want to upvote it even when they are not able to read it. Once you have so many people you are following, it's nearly impossible to get to every single person's post every day, so I appreciate the ability to autovote others whose content I've found consistently valuable. If someone who I autovote starts posting crap, I'll stop autovoting, and I expect my autovoters to do the same if I all of a sudden just start smearing shit across their feeds. Knowing I have the few autovoters that I do makes it that much important for me to make sure I'm contributing high quality content to the platform. And it has the added benefit of keeping me posting even through times of low activity on the platform. I think the ability to autovote is a net benefit to Steemit.

And I think you're wrong, @schattenjaeger, that the platform is not growing or that it's only attracting bottom of the barrel usership. In my local community, I've recently met five people who had heard of Steemit and had either joined or were planning to join. It was really exciting to see Steemit catching on without me being the megaphone holder, lol. But I was able to help those people with their questions and upvote their first posts. It feels good!