What are these rewards worth if everything is set up to vote for a handful of successful creators. One thousand auto voters distributing 40000 votes to the chosen ones based on previous success dictated by the previous round of auto votes. Ignoring the newcomers because there's no profit today while slowing but surely watching their investment diminish and not understanding why. If those abusing the reward system found out they are actually doing more harm to their investment than good, do you think they would change?
They got the memo about easy curation rewards. I don't think they saw the one about where it leads.
Find a way to boost curation rewards on lower reputation accounts as an incentive to change things up from time to time. Make them hunt. As reputation rises, so does SP for that user, curation rewards slowly diminish on high reputation accounts, but those users make up for the losses by being able to earn higher curation rewards due to being well established. People will still vote for higher rep accounts even if the curation rewards are slightly lower. Finding a promising noob is a curation reward in itself, for everyone, right?
That would be one problem with it, aside from the coding end, of course (can it even be accomplished -- I don't know).
One solution, from the content creator's end, is to adapt to the system. In the case of sharing photos, the author could write a few paragraphs detailing a bit of the story around how the picture(s) came to be and/or what the picture(s) means to them, etc. As to the comic, well, maybe this isn't the platform for that, if money is the main incentive? But, again, they could add in other things to lengthen viewing time.
Also, and I know this isn't ideal either, viewers (content curators) may decide to wait out the time limit on a post, out of respect to its quality.
Perhaps something like 1 minute, or even 30 seconds, would work better as the time limit. That way people aren't forced to sit idly on a short-post that they think deserves a 100% upvote and bots can't cast 30 100% upvotes in the span of 10 seconds.
EDIT:
Another possible solution is to set different time limits to different lead-tags. The limit could be set at something like 5 ~ 10 seconds for everything with "photography" as the first tag and vary anywhere from 5 seconds to perhaps several minutes, depending on the average length of other posts under those same tags. But talk about going as far north from K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) as possible! Plus, this type of system might lead to a new way to game -- focus on the small time limit tags.