An excellent and well thought out post! I am absolutely a curator and have always manually curated. On this account, I have almost never voted anything I haven't read.

I think the other problem with curation trails is that they stop people from voting on comments because they are always looking at their RC levels because reading and replying to comments on your posts is curation too.

Many find it strange that in the past, I had no objection to vote buying but as most of the vote selling services didn't care what posts were being voted upon, the whole system went to hell and was abused. I still believe there is a place for paid votes providing there is some serious moderation by the providers...this will never happen!

Good luck with your new manual curating, there is a lot of great and well-written articles on Hive, and thanks to POB, it's getting easier to find them!

PS Thanks for giving me someone new to follow. I'll get around to your back catalogue sooner or later!