Hey there, thanks for digging in. Since I am new to the platform I have not yet encouraged myself to take a deeper look into the curation part of Steemit, but instead, I have focussed on the quality of my posts. I am still not sure how rewarding based on curation is being calculated (still learning). But what I do know, if I am not mistaken, is that within the first 30 minutes after posting, your upvote is given a penalty on your own curation reward, which means that a cut of the 25% curation reward-pool, is added to the author reward-pool instead (which is not a bad thing to do if you consider that the post is valuable and the author him/herself is currently undervalued).