I submit as evidence the following screenshot of the Steemwhales.com 28-day trending curators rankings:
Yes, that's me on top of the list. I just passed @laonie (the previous automated-voting champion) on this list yesterday. To what do I owe my success? Well, in case you haven't been paying attention to my posts lately, I run a voting bot. It has been voting pretty successfully for a month now, even for languages I don't speak. I've been extremely happy with its performance, and I've been gradually creeping up on @laonie over the past weeks.
How does this help you?
Because you can vote with my bot! Last week, I invited the community to join my voting bot and start earning some of its curation rewards. Since then, at last count, my bot has earned people in this community over $115-worth of SP (at today's prices). For reports on how much it's earning whom, follow my other account @ozymandias. I post updates now and then over on his blog that show curation reward totals; I may post other interesting metrics as I develop them. Here's a recent one: Curation Report for 2016-10-26 22:57:21 to 2016-11-23 21:46:54.
What sorts of posts does the bot vote for?
My bot is different from many, in that it's content-unaware. It simply learns what sorts of posts earn large rewards, and votes strategically for those. Because of this, it almost never votes for things that make it to the front page. Most of those posts have all their curation rewards used up early, and are rather difficult to vote for profitably in an automated way. On the other hand, if you can find a post that is likely to have a $10-20 payout, and vote for it right at the 30-minute mark, you can earn significant rewards. This is my bot's strategy.
How can people in the community join the bot and earn rewards?
If you want me to add you to the voting bot, just send me your Posting Key and account name on steemit.chat or to my email address that you can pull from my website. I'll add you to my bot and you'll start climbing up the trending curators rankings as well.
Does it cost anything?
Not yet. Some of my clients are tipping me, which I appreciate very much. I always vote my account first on every post, which means that I earn slightly higher curation rewards than my clients; this suffices as a payment for now. I'm contemplating implementing a bidding system where my clients bid on vote position, but I haven't designed the auction yet. So for now, it's free. If you're a very small account, I reserve the right to delay your vote to a bit later than my bigger clients.
Is it ethical to use a bot for voting?
That's a hotly-debated question, and as a bot creator I suppose I've forced myself into that debate. Of course you'll expect me to think it's totally ethically fine; but all along I've been saying that serious trouble could come if bots end up being too prolific. My bot chases profits - it's purely greedy. I have a few accounts blacklisted because I don't believe in their message (example: fear-profiteers like @dollarvigilante), but for the most part my bot just votes for what it thinks will earn it rewards. This is fine in principle, but if I get too many voters following my bot, then my bot's votes will actually start affecting the profitability of posts. It will learn this, and each of its votes will end up being a tiny little self-fulfilling prophecy. This type of singularity seems like it would be bad for Steem.
Now, I think the incentives are structured such that having a huge pile of vote-followers would not actually be rational; but one of the long-standing problems with Steem is that most voters don't know a single thing about how curation rewards work. Incentives are only valuable if people understand them, and the dev team's apparent hatred of documentation works against this.
So, I think automated curation is intriguing; but whether or not it is helpful is probably completely dependent on the incentives.