No penalty nor bonus, no matter when you vote. Casual voters will feel good and enjoy voting.

the problem with pure linear distribution for curation rewards is that it creates a huge incentive to vote for posts that are already the most popular.

That is to say, my best strategy is to camp out on the trending page and vote for top trending posts. If i get 10X more curation reward for voting on the post with $100 on it than i do for voting on the post with $10 on it, why would i ever vote for the $10 post? I will get guaranteed max curation rewards by voting only on the posts that already have the highest payout.

Under the current system, my incentive to vote on the $10 post is that it might eventually become a $100 post, and ill get more reward for voting while its only valued at $10. Under a pure linear system, i can just wait and see if its worth $100 eventually and cast my vote then.