I personally only curate manually at the moment because I feels like it means a little more if I vote that way. I do admit that I heavily rely on auto votes from some individuals and a few other things that I am a part of so I definitely feel a little sting when that happens lol.

I never really used bidbots (unless sbi counts, I have been buying people shares of that when I think that they deserve more than I can give with my tiny upvotes). I think I tried an actual one or two of the super cheep ones when I first started on the site but then I saw that people were making a good case against using them for ethical reasons and I decided that they were probably right about that.

I don't know what the answer is. For my part, I do try to reward the people who I know curated my posts manually with the resources I have available (my vote isn't worth much but I will go engage with a person's content if I can). That won't make much of a dent in things here but If enough of us do it, it might give more people a reason to go out and engage with each other.