I thought it was because people used to engage, however that was when I had more SP so perhaps people were just trying to curry favour.
In my experience, this certainly factors into engagement. I had a lot more interaction on my posts when I had a 2+ million SP voting trail and when I had almost 400K with delegations. It’s one of the more unfortunate aspects of the culture here.
And yes, when you post about Steem/Steemit, you tend to get more votes and comments. That has pretty much always been the case and is where the original “circle-jerking” criticisms had come from.
As for the actual HF details - I think a lot of people were intentionally stoking fears because they actually believed that their post earnings would inevitably decrease. I tried to tell people that this would not necessarily be the case. And I underestimated the impact of downvoting, which has helped distribute poorly-allocated rewards to better content/users.
But the ones screaming about how everything would be terrible were either doing so out of fear of “profit” loss (as authors), seizing on populist rhetoric (large stakeholders = bad!), or just from a place of general ignorance regarding economics and incentives...or any combination of the three.
Anyway...there’s still a lot more that can and should be done, but this was a good step in the right direction, as I hoped and predicted that it would be.
Unfortunately, I’m hearing that some people want to possibly go back to linear rewards in the future and that some want to pretty much just turn STEEM into a utility token. So we’re still up against people with terrible ideas that never learn from massive past mistakes. Hopefully we’ll grow out of such ignorance/stupidity someday.