Dan -
I don't think it's necessarily a flaw with curating, but more of an issue with the whales that are curating. It seems that many of them are voting on posts for the express purpose of making money, not for seeking and rewarding quality.
There appears to be a feedback loop consisting of trending topic and whale voting, then an influx of other voters jumping in to "ride the whale," so to speak, in order to try to get some of the curating rewards. You can even see some of the attempts at preemption from dolphins and minnows. A post less than a minute old can have four or five pages worth of content, but already have upwards of 10-20 votes.
The whales should probably start seeking better quality content if they want a viable platform for the long haul. That's going to involve passing on the easy cash and spending more time searching new and obscure contributors. The question is whether or not the whales that don't currently do that are willing to do so.
"but already have upwards of 10-20 votes."
I see this less as trying to ride the whale and more "these people voting are fairly new and have no idea about the 30-minute rule".
You're bringing in people who have been trained, through other platforms, to click "Like", the "Up" arrow, or the "Thanks" button whenever they appreciate the content, agree with the content, or find the content funny...and then they move on to the next post.
So that's what they're doing,
Discounting all the bots, of course.
My point was that there's no way they could have read the content within the first minute. They're just upvoting based on prior earnings by the author. And there's no doubt that they don't understand the 30-minute rule. They just think that they'll be getting rewarded, apparently.