Ah thanks that makes it a lot clearer what @qurator is about. Yeah all in all I would have to say it is substantially better than the pure vote buy services e.g. minnowbooster et al. Those very clearly serve to concentrate wealth in the pockets of the whales who delegate the SP behind the vote buy service, and there is absolutely no mechanism in place to ensure that the content which is promoted in this manner is "good", or even can meet the much lower bar of "not plagiarized". It is good to hear that there is at least some sort of review process in place for the @qurator service.

I would still have to say all in all I am opposed to even more benign versions of vote selling services like @qurator though. This may be a case of me letting the perfect be the enemy of the good however; I can be a bit of an idealist at times and that doesn't always work well in the "real world". On the other hand, there is absolutely nothing to say we have to take the worst elements of the "real world" along with us as we create the Steem future we want to live and breath. Voting power is a renewable, non-depletable resource. The entire reward algorithm and "proof of brain" concept that supposedly underpins this entire endeavor is based around the assumption that votes will be given freely to reward good content. When the Steem and SBD that are paid out in rewards are funneled back to vote buy services to pay for rewards, it short circuits the intended feedback mechanism. Content is no longer visible because it is good content and has been upvoted as such - content is visible (typically) because either A: the content creator has high stake friends on platform that upvote all content produced by said creator; or B: the content creator has paid $ for upvotes. This sucks to put it bluntly. Of course there are exceptions to this but more and more this is becoming the norm. At least with a big @curie upvote both the initial curator and the eventual reviewer have spent considerable time and energy double checking that the content is both original and original to Steemit, no money was exchanged in return for the upvote, and two humans need to agree that the content is exceptional. Curie is not designed however to be a long term solution for authors - it is designed to give a boost to undiscovered authors and give them some rewards that they can turn into stake on the platform if so desired. Ultimately it takes really building up a network here, it takes really engaging and reading and commenting on other authors. It takes engaging in chat communities. In short it takes making the human connections necessary to compete with the proliferation of vote buy services. That is a lot of work, and a lot harder than just paying for votes. I understand this.

EDIT: Not as self promotion, but just as an example of an alternative to something like @qurator, I have started two curation initiatives: @r-bot and @humanbot. @r-bot upvotes "good, undervalued posts" (subjectively determined by a team of manual curators including myself) and @humanbot currently only upvotes posts that I award a Badge of Originality to but will shortly have a vote bot set up so all the 14 badge holders can call the @humanbot vote when they award their own Badge of Originality for human certified original work. Both of these accounts have curation trails set up at steemauto.com. I have secured some SP delegation with no offer of anything in return, and this helps to boost up these initiatives. A 100% r-bot vote is around $2 and a humanbot vote around $4 once the associated vote trailers come through behind the original vote.
I do not ask anything for these upvotes and basically am taking the delegated SP that I have been entrusted with and am handing out upvotes on good posts to good posters. As these accounts grow with more users following the curation trail and more manual curators upvoting posts for the services, they will reach more and more users with upvotes. To me, this is the spirit of Steem. Steem is, or should be, a gift economy.

Further reading on @humanbot and the Badge of Originality / Human Certified Original Works:
https://steemit.com/curation/@carlgnash/what-human-certified-original-works-means-to-me-a-totally-unofficial-mission-statement-from-just-one-person-in-a-decentralized

Further reading on @r-bot:
https://steemit.com/curation/@r-bot/r-bot-r-port-december-7th-2017-analysis-to-back-up-delegation-or-curation-vote-trail-on-steemauto-com

/edit

Dang I just typed a ton on your blog today LOL