Hi @hobo.fund
It's great to see that you're optimistic about hf21. This fork indeed "has made some significant changes to the Steem blockchain" and I'm wondering how will users behaviours change.
Perhaps the largest change, however, is the new 20 STEEM curation threshold set on posts and comments.
I tried to find any info about it and I couldn't. Any chance you could share link with this information being publicly shared by Steemit Inc?
This threshold is designed to prevent whales and really anyone from spamming the blockchain with posts and comments to self-vote.
Now, all posts and comments below 20 STEEM will experience a reward penalty and every post and comment above 20 STEEM will receive a reward bonus.
OMG. How it that stop whales from self-upvoting ? This Im still not sure and I would love to know.
I wonder what will be "penalty" for not reaching 20steem in rewards. It's pretty much not possible for regular users to ever reach that much without using bidbots. Wouldn't you agree?
Right now I think that the only content creators will be either those who do not care about rewards at all, or those who are wealthy and for that reason they are in "rich peoples club" (whales seem to support mostly each other, in hope of getting solid upvotes in return).
You said that "it does now require people to work harder" -> my impression is that most users (I've read tons of comments) already struggled with lack of visibility. Building followerbase for new users will be harder than ever. For those without $$$ ... goal hardly possible to achieve.
I wonder how many small users will still be on Steemit before this year will be over.
Upvote on the way! Catch :)
Yours,
Piotr
Hi @crypto.piotr my apologies for such a late reply.
Apparently, the threshold has turned out to be $10, which is quite a bit higher than 20 STEEM at the moment...
So, previously, people were buying large amounts of SP to upvote only their own content. This is unappealing to many of the members of Steem, so the penalty to rewards below $10 does effectively require everyone to upvote in a more social way. Very few whales even have a $10 upvote, so now th whales even have to coordinate with each other.
This is bad news for many smaller bloggers, no doubt about that. I would not say that #NewSteem is necessarily a better Steem. However, for the HoboDAO project, the changes were beneficial.
See, now more than ever, people need to congregate into large communities and delegate to human-powered curation programs. That is exactly what the HoboDAO is, so #NewSteem might not be a good change for most bloggers, but it is very good for the HoboDAO.
I actually protested the changes before they happened, but once they went through I accepted the changes. I thought the changes would be bad for Steem, but I knew it was good for our project the HoboDAO.
I encourage the bloggers that are struggling due to the changes to get involved in the HoboDAO, because this system has a much better potential for helping them grow and profit than for them to just try doing it alone.