It seems that no one has the time for reading posts - some might be "speed reading" articles but the vast majority are not even doing that.
This is the era of instant gratification and the rise of the bots is a reality already. Even people who read posts(the tiny few) may be using bots for upvoting - simply because they may not have the time to read all that they may want to and then upvote.
The thing is - there is a huge, mammoth amount of content being published every day, every hour, that it is impossible to go through even a small percentage of it. Hence the rise of the autovote, as you put it.
It seems the majority of votes are from autovoting and trail following.
Hence this result, as most people rely on bots to do their voting.
Yep. I'm having to shorten my articles to the point where they barely have content to try and get anyone to read them. The ADD online is getting out of control.
I figure you have 4 sentences and a picture, if you are lucky, to hook someone.
We need more posts on fidget spinners!
Indeed. It's been like this for a while. I've always found it largely makes a mockery of pretending to be "social media" as a result when most of the upvotes don't come from actually evaluating content.
Sadly so...
Most people still read content and don't have the time to comment, they just upvote and move on.... Its all in one blender...