The curation is really great.
Sniping can be very profitable. There are a few predictable whales to front run.
It's better than self voting and vote trading. The only problem is a lot of people are doing it on the accounts that are famous for that .
There are a lot of real abusers to continue to deal with first then maybe that can come after they've given up.
I've turned off auto voting off most personal accounts and am mostly doing it for initiatives and trails these days. It's only cost me around 10% in the last two weeks and since I don't have millions of SP, meh.
I've set my trail so it follow votes around 0.01 SBD which surely makes the minnows happy when they see that especially since I'm following a few very small ones. I wish I could increase it to 0.025 SBD so I need to buy more steem or vote for less. Let's see what happens.
Sniping the whales isn't as profitable as most people think it is. It's a competitive game. I'll let you in on a secret. Go for the second tier user, not the highest earners. The vote mass to front run can be much more favourably distributed. Also, if you find a post you think might become popular, give it a big upvote and resteem it to put more eyes on it!
I suggest anyone who doubts my words go and take a deep dive into the curation rewards on SteemWorld.
Actually on my trail votes I have fairly tight limits and avoid voting on people with too many votes or rewards automatically. Can't vote for everyone and the people with smaller payouts will notice it more.
I'll still manually curate whatever I lile regardless.