It would be nice if there was an official mention in the FAQ about how curation rewards scale with early vs late voting. It's not something you would intuitively realize unless you came across a post like this.

The other thing is I wish they would start the curation penalty at 50% and scale down over 30 min. I'm really confused as to what Steem wants us to do. Are we supposed to get in early for undiscovered posts? Or are we supposed to vote later when we're locked out of a curation reward? For most new members, almost all of your votes are not returning any curation rewards, so while you should be promoting work that you like, it's also a bit frustrating that mostly don't get to participate in curation. I get the reasoning for structuring each of these individually, however it seems like they are pushing opposing behaviors.