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I'd wager that many of those votes are still people hoping for that curation reward after the rancho vote and have nothing at all to do with the actual content.

I was actually wondering the same. Do we know at how many minutes the big upvotes usually came? If they insta-upvoted then not much curation would be left. But even then, many people might not know about how the reward is split based on the time of the upvotes.