for some reason I can't reply directly to your post so hopefully you see this.
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!
The 30 minute delay was apparently set up to prevent bots from gaming the system and being first to upvote every time ( because the algorithm gives higher rewards to users who upvote early)
If you use a bot I suggest you set it up so that it upvotes posts 30 min after the post was published, that's how you are going to make more money curating.