I agree that Steemmonsters is pretty much the only thing that gets it right.
The problem with Steem is that the incentives are totally messed up and it forces everyone that wants to do well on the platform in a direction they probably don't want to go in. There is a huge pressure to bring out at least 1 post a day and you see a trend of people putting less and less effort into it because you can get more rewards bending your way to what's easy to produce (Spam Actifit reports / Steemmonsters Reward Card posts / ...) and gets tribe token upvotes by abusing tags like you are doing now with Sportstalk. I don't blame you for it, but it does make it impossible to keep you on my auto-upvote list for now moving you into manual curation as I have quite some SPORTS staked.
I hope the platform finds a way to restore the balance as it's just ridiculous right now what's going on with most content.
No problem and sorry about the addition of sportstalk tag. :)
I started using Busy.org back (from ESteem) again this week and I noticed that staging.busy.org do not limit tags there so I just copy/pastied someone's tags (since he also takes advantage of those tokens) and I forgot to remove sportstalk (I did remove 'spt' and 'steemace' though lol).
And yeah, I hope that this change will not affect much SteemMonsters and their DEC token. If I am not mistaken a lot of people love hodling DEC tokens before because they can use it to exchange for upvote, now with the 50/50 split I'm afraid many would not use that feature anymore and thus might affect the value of DEC.
I do believe the steemmonsters upvotes have been changed so they are good for 50/50, it's all quite complicated though. I will be taking some time next week to properly adjust to all the changes that have taken place. I have some delegations running to daily group upvote account (jumbot, steemraiser) but I doubt that they will be able to have a solution for HF21. I'll make sure @upvoteshares gives at least a 10x self-upvote return and probably will add some kind of dividend payout each time a new level is reached as a way to balance the 50/50. I've set the upvotes at 4 minutes now but from what I understand it just burns part of the curation instead of giving it to the author as it used to be the case.
Small accounts will get hit hard by the HF, it's pretty much impossible to upvote posts that earn <1$ and don't bump it up using bots to 4$+ as you lose out on so much curation upvoting those.
I'm not sure where this will all end, I just hate the fact that the system pushed users to more shady behavior. It used to be about making posts about what you generally love and finding like-minded people in the process to just doing what's most profitable. I hope the platform manages to overcome this somehow but I don't see it happening anytime soon. I hope you stick to it!