About the 30 minute time:
At 0 minutes, the author gets all the curation from the vote.
At 3 minutes, the author get 90% of the curation from the vote.
...
At 30 minutes, the author get 0% of the curation from the vote.
But, the first person who votes gets lots more curation than the 10th person who votes, etc...
I have always not voted for myself (in the first 30 minutes) to allow other people to get the curation reward. But, I have always voted for myself. I had 40 votes/day, and I would feel a shmuck for not voting for myself. I put lots of effort into the post, I should acknowledge it, sort of thing
Now that I have 10 votes/day, I am unsure what I will do.
Are you saying I got it backwards?
Not really... I would say you got it right for the wrong reason.
It is that before 30 minutes the author gets a portion of the curation.
At 0 minutes, the voter gets 0% of the curation vote.
At 3 minutes, the voter gets 10% of the curation vote.
At 30 minutes, the voter gets 100% of the curation vote.
But, if you could get 100 Steem * 10% for voting at 3 minutes
as opposed to
Getting 2 Steem * 100% at 30 minutes, which would you do?
This was implemented to "give humans time to read the post"
So that bots wouldn't vote at 0.001 seconds after posting.
Not sure if that worked out all that well.