Not in all cases, snowflake. I use a bot because a lot of times I'm busy and distracted by other things, and I want to make sure to upvote the people on Steemit who I support. Then later - sometimes well after the payout - I'll come back in and read the posts I missed. At other times, like with this post, I bot upvote it, but I come in and read it and comment on it the same day it's posted, sometimes within minutes of it being posted.

I didn't know about the 30 minute delay you mentioned. Can you point me to some documentation about it? I think most people have had no clue about that. Why does the 30 minute delay for higher curation rewards exist? To discourage post comment stampeding or something else? Thanks!