While to some degree, the desire is get people to spend the time to read and digest the post instead of just clicking upvote. But the bigger motivation behind the 30 minute penalty is because of voting bots that used to upvote right after a post was created so earn lots of curation rewards.
There have been a lot of things done here specifically to protect against bots being able to collect large amounts of the reward pools.
Ok! Thank you!
I didn't know that there were robots here!
And, what do you think about trails, aren't them like robots?
While I can understand how some would lump bots and trails together, personally I view them a bit differently. Since bots are things that use a software program to actually decide what posts to vote on, where trails actually have a human at the helm doing the selecting.
While I'm sure some bots still exist here, they're not nearly as prevalent as they used to be.