I have a strong preference for manual curation myself. I publish the Internet's longest lived -- since 1991 -- daily news and commentary roundup for libertarians, and we've always resisted the urge to let automated scripts do our story-gathering for us. The human eye is still just much better at figuring out what's interesting and choosing quotes that show why something's interesting.

So, questions: What effect to these mutual upvote scripts and such have on the curation rewards system? How much harder do they make it for better content to get more eyeballs? Is there anything that can be done at the core code level to prevent curation gaming that reduces the ability to find quality content?