I think it is only natural that circles are going to pop up. It is an unavoidable part of the system. I start reading your content and I like what I read, you start reading my content and you like what you read. We start upvoting each other. Then you see some other people that follow me that you like and you start voting their stuff and you start voting theirs. Boom the circle just got bigger. I think the real issue is the circles that are upvoting crap content. Like you said, just a single picture with no text, or a screen grab of the current market prices, etc. Imagine what the circles are going to look like when communities are created?

In a perfect world, I think we would all manually curate. That just isn't going to happen though. We are busy people with busy lives. I don't see Auto-voting as inherently bad, just a fact of life. It is pretty rare that I auto-vote someone whose content I don't actually read at some point. That is probably what makes the difference between good auto voting and bad auto voting. Are you trying to maximize rewards and still read the content or just trying to get the most curation rewards possible?