RE: Seven Days In - My Thoughts and Experiences of Steemit Thus Far.
Basically what it is saying is that the closer you get to the 30 minute mark before upvoting someone's post, the more of the curation reward you get. If you upvote at 15 minutes, the author gets half of your curation award. If you upvote at 7-1/5 minutes after it's posted, the author gets 3/4s of your curation award. If you upvote a post about a minute after it's posted, you get almost none of the curation award. If you want to donate to the author, vote early. If you want to make the maximum curation award, vote at 30 minutes. Of course, the potential curation award is split between all the upvoters, and what you get depends on when you voted. If there's a lot of upvotes, and you're one of the last ones, say at 6 days after the post was posted, the curation award might be fairly large, but as a late upvoter, you won't get much of it. It's a weird system that has it's good parts and it's not so good parts.
You explained it very well! Haha.
Just came across this post! It touches on some of this but in the aspects of self voting.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@shayne/self-voting-the-benefits-and-drawbacks
I went there and read it, it makes sense to me what he said about self voting. I used to think it a bit tacky to vote for my own comments, but if someone else upvotes my comment, I'm going to upvote it also, it will have more value to whoever upvotes it that way, and I might get a little something from it myself. :-)