Hi Nathan! Great to see you're doing quite well. Got you some nice little rewards on your postings. Way to go. The more good posts the better the rewards. Imagine compared to Facebook or other social media sites, isn't STEEM awsum! :D Yes, I've done some EXTENSIVE reading the last 2 weeks. There is SO many tools around the STEEM platform already - and all of this is just beta, imagine in a year or two. Most of them should be listed here: www.steemtools.com You'll find a few treasures there. Also yesterday I stumbled over https://www.asksteem.com/ Brilliant!
Bots is definitely helping. For voting on your posts for example I use www.steemvoter.com It's a bit basic, so maybe https://streemian.com/ is a quite comprehensive tool to look at. Didn't do that yet.
Anyway, with Hard Fork 19 voting changes. With only 10 votes a day you're good in curating. By then bots are not so necessary anymore I'd assume. The min. 40 votes a day you'd need now to curate best is a bit hard to achieve manually. With 10 or 20 votes, that's cool to do it manually. I didn't even start blogging yet and still the account is nicely growing. Definitely love the decission to join STEEM. The community is heartwarming and the regulation mechanisms mostly work. Surprizing in our todays world. Huge support from my side.