I'm a manual curator and I don't upvote anything that has bots on it. I upvote in the first 25 minutes to 2 days and promote what I upvote on steemit and on my other social media.

I use Hive account@minnowbooster on my 6 day old posts if they have a low payout for these reasons:

• to give a bigger reward to the people who upvoted me so maybe they will come back. I also upvote good comments on my posts for that reason.
• to give me a bigger payout so I don't feel discouraged.
• to recycle some of my sbd into sp easily. Growing sp is my current steemit goal.

I do this on day 6 because it does not sit there looking spammy/scammy in those first 5 days. I know of many manual curators who do not vote on bot posts. This is because we do not find as high quality of posts on bot-driven posts and because we do not make as much rewards by voting on them.

We do much better finding something 35 minutes old with $1 on it and pushing it to $20-$40 with real voters. I'm not sure why that happens but it's true. The posts with 150 tiny votes do not payout as well.

bots - not recommended by me - a new and not that successful steemer so take that as you will :)