I agree with you on that one, it feels a little dumb some times knowing a post will be popular but there are many others thinking the same, let's wait for 25-30 minutes, then boom bots appear.

But then again, with more users, and same rules, people will start making bots to trigger at 29 minutes instead, or 28, or like many right now already are doing to support the author more, they upvote on 15 minutes and share curation rewards. Some users do it before 15 minutes, while I bet many are already making bots to do the same.

In the end it won't matter too much I think, with more users and SteemPower in more users wallets, people will distinguish bot upvotes from user upvotes and choose what to reward themselves thus creating 2 groups of voters.

Or the rules will just be adjusted over time and come up with something better, thats what's so awesome about open-source. :)