Time for some more newbie-ish musings about Steem! This time, I've been thinking about curation trails.

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The Perils(?) of Curation Trails

Last week, I was really sick, and had a few days where I wasn't good for much besides lying on the couch playing video games. And that included logging into Steem, even to read and curate like a normally do.

So when I finally logged back on, I found that hundreds of upvotes had been made on my behalf. No mystery there; a while ago, I set myself up on SteemAuto to follow Hive account@curie's curation trail whenever my VP was above 95%. This was just the first time my VP had been that high for any prolonged period of time.

My intent in following a curation trail had just been not to waste VP when I wasn't on Steem, and for that, everything worked out well.

But since I'm a thinky kind of person, I started thinking: What did I actually curate?

More specifically, I've been wondering whether, when I follow a curation trail, I'm really upvoting stuff that I want to curate. Did I upvote things I totally disagree with? Was everything that was upvoted on my behalf really something I think should have more exposure on Steem?

After all, if I upvote something, the implication is that I endorse its content--or at least that I think it's content that other people should be reading.

Plus, my intent when I'm curating manually on Steem is two-fold: first, to reward authors that I think have created really good content, and, second, to do my part to make sure that the content I think is the best on Steem is seen by more readers. When I think of it that way, curating starts to seem like a big responsibility.

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What Should I Do Instead?

So now I feel a little bit uncomfortable about blindly following a curation trail. But I still feel like it's irresponsible, or at least a little bit wasteful, to let my VP sit at 100% for any extended period of time.

One thing I've been thinking about doing is using SteemAuto to set up autovotes for authors that I like and that I think create posts of consistent quality. There's no shortage of those, and that would probably keep my VP from "idling".

Or, maybe I should stop worrying about wasting VP, and just stick to manual curation all of the time. That seems the most true to my personal goal of curation as a way to make Steem a better place, even if I end up not using all possible voting power.

What Do You Do?

I'm curious what other people do with their spare VP. Do you care about using every last drop of VP that's provided to you on the Steem platform? Does it bother you if following a curation trail means you end up upvoting content you don't love? Do you do some other kind of autovoting?

Let me know in the comments! Maybe you'll inspire me out of my current analysis paralysis.