RE: Auto Voters Yes Or No? Steemdunk Is My Choice With The Right Balance Of Manual Curation.

Very impolite and unkind

That is one way of looking at it. But to be honest: I don't really look in my own HOME FEED anymore, I already follow too many people to get to the good posts. I did not unfollow yet, but since months I hardly add user to my Follow list anymore. I reduced my 'general' time on Steemit, and focus on music more. This also reduced greatly my time spend on Steemit related topics, I used to do a lot, reading a lot of post, trying to articulate my own opinion and try and drive Steemit (culture/technology etc) in a direction I believe it shall go. This resulted in lower number of users coming to my post; Well to be honest, most users didn't came to my post before as well, but at least they would from time to time notice one of my posts and comment/reward it. What this user @kyriacos likely will start experiencing is what he stated at the end of his post as something that may happen - I can tell you, it will happen since I see same things happened to myself, or better said: my posts. Auto voters are leaving, and less users coming to my posts to read and vote for it. Lately I even notice I get quite interesting number of views (in relative terms) , and sometimes also interesting number of comments (again in relative terms), but hardly any vote. That is maybe the dynamic of the whole platform (I don't know), but for sure I noticed my rewards dropping (again in relative terms, since note that Steem increased with a factor of 4 to 6 over the value of this summer and even mid-December), and when accounting for that, a post reward of 5$ now, is a post reward of 1$ not even three weeks ago, before Steem price went up quite a lot. Anyway, enough about that part, it is diverting from the question you asked.

So, based on how I handle my FOLLOWED users, ie not look in my own FEED, has the same effect for myself to see the posts of those I follow as if I would unfollow them all. The later is more transparent, since in the behaviour I have, those who I follow may think I read their post (from time to time) but in fact the chance is even much less (for most of those I follow) since I don't have a trigger to actually look into their post. Unless they come to my posts and write a nice comment (then I may go to their FEED and read/comment/vote for a nice post from them).

Another issue I see with for instance first looking into your own FEED to discover good posts, is that anybody who is not in your follow list, get less chance to get noticed with their good post. And because most of us do not have a lot of time to spend on Steemit, we are creating more and more more-or-less closed groups. That in itself is not an issue persé, BUT since we distribute real currency, we are contributing to the fact to not spread our power towards a larger group, especially the newbies, and they will then go to more extreme measures to get noticed... We all know this dynamic, and IMHO we shall try our own best to not follow the general behaviour and try and contribute to spreading the daily distributed Steem to a larger group, and try and avoid to vote for those who consistently get high to super high rewards, even when they create continuously high quality posts. The question I always ask myself, is every post of some author getting eg 500-1000$ per post indeed that much better than good posts from someone who get lets say 1-10$ or even 10-50ct per post? This are factors of 100 to 10.000 difference, more than what we see in our real lives between top earners and lowest earners.

So long story short: answer to your question: is it impolite and rude to unfollow users. I don't think so - although I hesitate myself to start unfollowing users - I actually think it gives more openness, therefore honesty by indeed unfollowing users when you would for instance never comment and vote for the post of a user you follow.