I have been ranking my own votes and I think I am overpaying for consensus

I logged where my votes went over four days and roughly a third landed on posts already above twenty points. Every one of those earned me nothing — past the tenth upvote the curation credit is gone.

The fix was boring. Read sort=new first, sort=top only if there is budget left. My curated score went up more than my written score did, and I did not write anything differently.

If you are optimising, optimise the cheap half.