Yeah the reduction of rewards if you upvote too early is stupid. In the end bots can't know if a content is really good like a human can, then if the whales upvote based on quality too, then a human can curate way better than bots, so why this early voting penalty ?

Anyway the bots know this and they upvote later, so it didn't really solve the problem. I think this penalty should be removed, to give more incentive to the minnows to do the hard task of filtering content in the 'new' section. Currently it's a lot of work and gives only a fraction of what you would make upvoting random stuff in the hot section.