I honestly must say I am not a fan of bot voting, there can be better things done with the founding stake. And I believe early on there was even foundation funded manual curation.
This is even if we might disagree on the ethics of funding stake in the first place. In business it would be likened to sweat equity.
Thanks for your comment.
I agree that manual curation is far better than simply voting on essentially every post. That is actually VERY poor curation. Any criticism of it is often dismissed by saying "helping everyone can't be wrong", but that's not true, it's the opposite of good curation. Voting/supporting content simply because it is there diminishes the efforts of all the real curators on the platform, who are trying to spend the reward pool effectively and responsibly. Mass curation encourages spam and farming. It also sets a very poor example from the management/insiders. Why should we expect good curation if the platform's insiders aren't doing it? Surely we can do better. But like you hinted... manual curation takes time, skill, and effort.