In light of this, can you explain why there's still an early voting penalty at all? It seems like if the goal is to reward curators it would be better served by making curation 25% from the beginning, rather than just making votes in the first fifteen minutes worth less than votes coming in later.
I read this as "why not get rid of it".
I guess your reply though indicates why it was moved from 30 to 15 instead of getting rid of it entirely. It is a happy medium between people like you (who want to keep it, and have it high) and people who want to get rid of it / lower it.
I don't think you're grasping my argument at all. Moving it to 15 and getting rid of the additional rewards isn't in any way a happy medium. Moving it to 15 is irrelevant; the difference is between having all of the vote value given to the post, and having some of the vote value senselessly trashed.
A happy medium would be giving the additional rewards to the successful curators instead of the author.
The closer the 30 gets to 0, the more it goes towards paying curators the "full" 25% regardless of when they vote.
If I make a run at this from a different direction: I have a fifteen-cent vote, and I want that vote to be worth fifteen cents to somebody when I cast it. Not fifteen cents but only if no one happened to vote on that post in the first fifteen minutes, otherwise less.
By trashing some of the curation, an early vote now makes my one-hour vote on that post worth less than the same vote cast on a post that didn't have early votes, because some of its value won't go to the post at all, it just disappears as if I had never cast that part of the vote. I still lose the voting power though.
How is that not completely insane?
The system doesn't work the way you want it to. That is not necessarily insanity. If you care about 100% of your vote being used, wait until the 15 minuets are over. The system is going to reward curators with a portion of your vote at that point though, because that is how the system works. It is not "your" money that is being paid out. You are only voting to influence how the rewards are distributed.
That doesn't work. I not only need to wait until the fifteen minutes are over, I need to only vote on posts where everyone else did also, or else some of my vote value is trashed.
I'm not remotely complaining about that. I think you're still reading this very badly.