Not upset, you say this:
all these good intentions rely on theories by idealists without pragmatic attitudes or experience.
yet seem to have a lot less experience and understanding of the platform than most on this post. Again not trying to offend you but you're making assumptions and bringing forth examples that only happen a minority of the time.
Why do you think people would use their downvotes to downvote genuine posts that have "earned" rewards compared to having bought them from bots. "earned" cause nothing is earned until payout is through, upvoting and downvoting is only a tool to allocate the rewardspool towards accounts. Then yes you go on a rant talking about your altruistic endeavors, and even though I believe I've been rather altruistic myself even though I'm not in the best position either and currently powering down at these low prices, I do have to ask if you understand how the markets work. You realize for every Steem that gets sold there has to be a buyer, for most rewards you allocate to users that end up selling that Steem there has to be a counter investment back into the platform in one way or another. It can't just be "they are here and they are active, let's help them survive", what are other platforms or cryptocurrencies doing for people in need? Why is it that I only hear about a $60 dash donation and how dash is making big waves in venezuela on the internet but nothing ever comes out of Steem? Where is the marketing and the investment back to continue keeping this platform and relationship with Steem healthy so that it won't just dry up and bring everyone under considering how many people are relying on it. Well I haven't seen much of it, many like to complain about rewards yet have not remained invested. Many like to complain about changes yet only think about them from their own, often times shortsighted viewpoint.
There is this weird entitlement when it comes to Steem and at the same time the thought process of "someone else will take care of it". For every post that gets spammed in my DM's daily instead of using the share functions to share it onto other social media platforms and bringing in new users we would probably be doing a lot better. Yet most people just think about themselves and their short term gain. I'm not pointing this at the people you mentioned cause I understand their situation is dire but not many other Steemians are doing much to help the platform that introduced them to crypto, possibly changed their lives or if anything let them earn some rewards instead of making rewards out of them like most centralized platforms do. It's almost like no one deserves it to begin with, or at least that's what it has been feeling like lately.
So that was a counter rant to your rant, from someone who stayed powered up for most of my 3 years, powered up around 20k sp above $2 and is instantly being pointed at for powering down by other community leaders and rumors start to spread if i'm leaving steem for good without bothering to ask what's up or what I'm doing. That's Steemians for ya. You might be right that not much will change with the HF changes, as it seems in this thread most will not downvote, i.e. risk their cozy post rewards to downvote bid bot abuse that's just been taking their rewards while enriching owners and delegators for the longest time. Band together and see to it that deserving posts get the rewards and help the little guys get some rewards with the new curve. It might be that the negatives to the downvote pool will outweigh the positives, who knows, maybe that's just who we are and I guess then we will all deserve eachother at the bottom of the coinmarketcap ranks. One thing is for certain though that keeping these same rules going with the leeching of accounts such as haejin who has been using his buddy's account to self-vote garbage placeholder content that gives no benefits to Steem or kingscrown who doesn't bother taking longer than 5 minutes to write a post but invests all the time to get as much rewards as possible from anyone that gives in to his dms while votetrading with a delegation with as little skin in the game as possible or other votetrading groups that think we are going to get anywhere if we don't curate the way it was meant to and make that competitive instead of this safe proof of stake piece of shit that this blockchain has become with the same faces on trending every day and the same shit every day while everyone just thinks of their own ass no matter if it will cost everyone this opportunity to make something great off of Steem.
Anyway, not in the best mood so a lot of what I may have said might be emotionally driven, but at the end of the day who cares, it's not like there are many readers around today anyway and I haven't been one for caring that something will be "permanently on the blockchain" in previous rants either. I like to say my opinion and that's kind of how I'm feeling lately, if the new changes won't help us in any way then I don't really know, I'll probably still continue my attempts at distribution with ocd&ocdb, etc but part of me will be dead inside.