RE: Serial Image Plagiariser being Upvoted by Curation Trail. Request unvotes so we may flag for effect.
Hi @simplymike, glad to see you again!
Yes, they can indeed be problematic. There is only one that I follow currently which is the @christian-trail who have helped me from my beginning on Steem. It's a nominal weight and I highly prefer manual curation provided I have adequate time. When I do not, I had an auto-voting script I would run with my personal list of authors I believe to produce good content and are working towards the betterment of the platform.
I think it would be helpful if someone where to develop an app similar to smartsteem but with a custom whitelist for when voting power tops off. I had a friend who used smartsteem but he wasn't too happy with his votes being used on excessive vote buyers like @chbartist. Think there could be a demand for that sort of thing. I would do it but web development isn't my strong suite. I do know how to script to get things done but my method is chaotic to say the least.
Glad to run into you again, @anthonyadavisii
I agree that manual curation is still the best way to go, but while I was absent I set up a series of aurovotes and followed a couple of curation trails.
Another thing that bothered me about the situation with the curation trails I mentioned above was the lack of transparency: I tried to figure out which curation trail had voted on those posts, but couldn't find it...
When you mention "an app similar to Smartsteem", you are talking about selling votes?
Selling votes is another league, IMO. I did it for a while, but just like your friend I couldn't live with the fact that my vote could go to simply everyone, so I stopped doing it.
The curation trails I follow now (with only a small percentage of my voting power) are aimed at supporting people more than earning curation rewards, like @newbieresteemday and @friendsofgondor. Of course, you can never be 100% sure where your vote ends up, but I do believe both initiatives work with the best intentions.
I still have some autovotes set up, since I'm still not active regularly. Just like you, I've set up the autovote system to vote on people that produce good content and have the right attitude towards SteemIt. I'll probably keep those set up until I'm full power again (although I suck at manual curation, and those autovotes earn me 5 to 10 times more in curation rewards than when I did everything myself, lol)
Don't mind the auto votes. You may consider doing what @fulltimegeek does: only choose authors who you know will most likely push out quality contents.
You can't fully trust some random curation trails you are not heavily involved in.
I'm pretty involved in both initiatives I mentioned above, so I'm pretty sure such akward things won't happen again.
I made the mistake of following rather unknown trails once, but it won't happen again. I learned my lesson :0)