Change is to reduce auto-voting and encourage manual curation. Abuse is subjective. Personally I think there is no such thing as abuse when chain allows users to perform such actions.
I understand your concerns. The main reason for the change was inactive users. Users must revisit their settings once in a while.
We will send notifications from now on to the inactive users.
Why do people in the blockchain have to have an "active" stake? If someone buys shares in a company do they have to be an "active" investor? Don't we want mass uptake of investors to buy Hive and power it up for passive income purposes using autovotes and curation trails ? Or are we saying as a blockchain we only want "active" investors and passive investment will be discouraged? Will anyone trust hive.vote not to change their preferences again after this? Most people who want to 'invest' just want to set some settings and come back in 12-18 months; not have to monitor continually changing requirements or log in each day to manually vote. Investment funds will just flow to coins like Tezos which simple staking rewards if we keep changing the goal posts.
Agree. Don't get me wrong, I do appreciate that you provide the service to the community and ultimately an independent app can make whatever changes it likes. I think overtime we will see more sophisticated development in this space to help with maximizing curation rewards for passive investors. If HIVE is to succeed and cover the selling pressure from the development fund and post inflation pool we need to make it attractive to passive investors. @therealwolf I know you were in support of introducing some passive staking rewards system at a blockchain level. Any plans to bring your smartsteem.com autovote trails over to hive?
There is not much point to that if the user is inactive, is there? They won't see it anyway.
As for the default weekly limit, if someone set a daily limit, they expect that in 7 days they will have voted at least 7 times. It would have made sense to set the weekly limit to 7 so that the many people who have no idea about the change will not get hurt. There are lots of people who have set their votes to those they trust will not post garbage and now don't log in for whatever reason. You just censored their votes with your arbitrary change. So much for the belief in freedom of choice. I urge you to change the default to at least 7 per week or preferably to reflect multiples of whatever their daily limit was set to. Anything less is censorship by you. For those who are active users, they can now go and change their settings as they see fit using the new extra feature.
My belief is that if you are going to provide a free service, then do that without harming anyone. We thank you for your generosity. If you are seeking to control the votes of others, then that is not really a free service, but a form of trade by taking control over others. Be honest and say that up front... I will take control of your votes if you use my service!
I also believe that the reason you made the change was honorable, but misguided. I hope that after reading this and some of the other comments, you will realize your mistake and correct it in the name of true decentralization and freedom of choice.