The curation rewards for votes that are clustered together, which we see when auto-voting or curation trials are used could be penalized. For example, if 10 votes occur within 1 minute, the curation reward could be reduced by 50% and the other 50% could be burned.

The problem with this idea is that bots can easily be programmed to distribute their votes in time more (even randomly), negating the impact of this change.

Another idea could involve adjusting the reverse auction for length of content.

To put manual curators on an equal footing with bots, I think the window would have to be expanded a lot (some here have suggested 2 hours), since manual curators just aren't sitting at their keyboards all the time. But maybe just expanding the window time a little could be useful if we had millions of users, so that there were enough people curating at any given time so that they spot new posts in something like the same order of time as a bot does. It comes down to whether the important time is the time to notice the post or the time to read the post. At the moment, I think both are important factors. With enough manual curators, reading time would become dominant I guess. But I don't think that we're at this point yet.