When you say curation you just mean upvoting posts early on when they get posted right, do you have a particular method?
I just follow something who does a lot of manual voting aswell as support Newbie Initivite to help people get started.
The more HP you have the more Curation you earn, its quite simple xD
Vote timing is important tho no? To get in within so many minutes. I uSed to follow that stuff back in the day with the auto bots etc but not gotten back into it at all.
You can say its important to some extent now, I don't really pay attention to that, that much.
That will also completely change with the upcomming HF25.
Where the voting window is removed and you now have 24 hours to vote for a post and every vote is "equal" depending on the amount of HP.
its hP/Staked based.