There is a gap in education on this. **You earn little to no curation reward by piling on to posts that are already popular.** The effective way to earn curation reward is to find posts that are not yet heavily voted and vote on them. But you also can't vote within the first 30 minutes (especially the first 10-15 minutes) so this rules out heavily followed authors like @dollarvigilante or @dantheman. What is left are excellent posts by unknown (or at least relatively unknown authors). If you find those and then they get discovered and heavily upvoted, *then* you can earn a lot.