Its sort of a neat perk of the eSteem mobile app that upon submitting a post (not this one... seems like it would be a conflict of interest) a decent stack of autovotes come in. A couple are from the app developers themselves, bots programmed to reward users of the app, but then along with them come a flood of automated follow-votes.
The concern I find in this isn't the nice $0.35-0.45 pump on my mobile posted stories (frankly that's nice at this early stage where so many of my posts get very close to $0.00) but that it may be keeping away organic votes from actual curators who have much more to offer, as well as driving away those minnows who could use the curation awards a vote would offer them.
As I discussed [earlier], the first 5 voters share most of the curation rewards, and the top 10 are really the only ones who get anything but dust unless the post gets up to the thousands of dollars area. So when the first 13 are from the eSteem bots and the bots that follow them what does that do for the real life curators who come along? And it's not like it's benefiting them; voting that early means that 99% of the curation award just comes back to me. But I don't want it... I want my curators to come and enjoy it.
I think the developers' hearts were in the right place with it, for sure, but I just don't think it's working out how they anticipated.