I saw a few posts where users complained they didn't get curation rewards at all even if those posts had high payouts. Some might remember @xeroc's new piston launch that got about 45k last week.
I was asking my self a rather similar question but I also had some doubts on why isn't my Voting Power up to 100% after 24h of non-voting activity as I initially and incorrectly understood.

Being a 1 week old steemer I went back to the basics and re-read the [Steem White Paper](https://steem.ly/WPpdf) today which helped me see how *Rate Limited Voting* works and I said to post a reminder for everyone. Here's the excerpt from the WP:

> A major part of minimizing abuse is the rate-limiting of voting. Individual users can only read and evaluate so many work items per day. Any attempt to vote more frequently than this is a sign of automation and potential abuse. Through rate limiting, stakeholders who vote more frequently have each vote count for less than stakeholders who vote less frequently. Attempts to divide tokens among multiple accounts also divides influence and therefore does not result in a net increase in influence nor bypass the rate-limit imposed on voting.
> ![Imgur](http://i.imgur.com/m3VUmp6.png)
> The charts above shows how a user’s voting power decreases every time they vote and then regenerates as time passes without voting. These charts use nominal time unit and could be made to scale to any targeted voting rate. Note that voting power rapidly drops off during periods of continuous voting, and then slowly recovers.
Voting power is multiplied by a user’s vesting tokens to determine how much share in the reward pool should be allocated to a given work item.

Bottomline is that you need to vote less at once and more spread throughout the day. That way your votes matter most ( to the author and to you as a reward) and you also get to regenerate faster.

PS. Upvoting your own posts counts as a vote as well so think about that when you author new items :)

Hope it helps!