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.