Thanks for the thoughtful comment @kenny-crane.

I've been doing the blogging gig for some 20-odd years and even though I have pursued that "popular content" angle a couple of times (not very successfully) I find that I just don't care... so I write "from the heart" about things that happen to interest me, or I feel passionate about, or I have a measure of expertise in. I wrote a pretty good piece on stamp collecting here... but who cares? But I had fun putting it together, and don't regret doing so and feel happy to have it as a part of my "body of work."

With reading/curating it's the same, for me... I manually read and vote on quite a few things, and leave quite a few comments... just because I like learning interesting and unusual things, and I like leaving the creator a little "footprint" to let them know that I appreciated their effort.