the early voting on posts and calling it curation is a misnomer. While it's intended to churn good posts up, we now know from experience that it doesn't necessarily do so.

Real curation is people putting their actual eyes and thoughts on the post and making a judgement call if it is a quality post or not. Those actions don't get a direct reward on the system and that is what would actually churn good posts up if those actions could be captured.