I’m against lowering curation rewards in general. I still think some numbers can be played with.

As someone who use to curate for several communities, I can say the rules were never in the manual curator's favor. Rushing to be the first biggest vote on a post to get the lions share has always been an issue.

Realistically a manual curator is not reading a single post or watching a full video, plagiarize checking, checking names against warnings lists, looking into post rewards, checking for suspicious account activity, contact other curators if needed, verifying information, and other things in under 5 mins. Let alone finding the post in that window.

What you can expect is for that to happen within the first 2 hours. Unless a post got overlooked than you could expect to see that window in the 12-24 hour range.

Option 1

Instead of trying to punish people for voting sooner than 5 minutes and treating it as first come first serve. What if the rules were changed?

Everyone who voted within the first 2 hours is treated as if they voted at the same time. After that, it can go back to usual.

Yes, this does create an issue and that will be with bots snipping the largest possible gains they can find at 1 hour and 59 mins for curation. Which if they over vote people could then down vote.

As long as there is enough profit to be made someone will program a bot to get the best possible ROI it can from curation. I would rather at least give the manual curators a chance even more so the ones who put in a lot of effort to make sure what they are voting on is genuine and should get more votes. For that to happen they need some time to do so which means they lose out in the current system when large votes are landing at 4 mins and 30 secs.

Option 2

Post value and voter data are encrypted and “unknown” for the first 2 hours before they get displayed and decrypted. Yes, you will still have those well-known high earners authors people will rush to. You will also have the unknown gems showing up once the 2 hours is done that manual curators found and rewarded.

I’m not quite sure how possible this would even be. I thought I’d toss it out there anyway.