It's not a fee taken from your rewards either, because the rewards are not yours until you are paid them, and this discussion is all about future rewards which aren't yours yet.
Semantics. I'm talking about the principle of the matter. If I'm promised a certain percentage of the rewards and rewards WILL be forthcoming, that percentage is what I expect. It is mine even if it isn't in my hands yet.
With this fork, that money coming from investors will be spent a bit differently going forward is all. A lot of it will still go to content rewards.
Semantics.
As @andrarchy says, ideally more of that will hopefully go to good content rewards. Some of what is currently coming out of the pool to fund projects will ideally shift over to SPS, leaving more of the remainder for content.
I don't care what he says and I disagree with funding the SPS via non-voluntary means. As far as the EIC, they're just promises of hypothetical gains based on how they think humans behave, in contrast to the objective gains large stakeholders and witnesses get. One is deterministic, one is not.
Overall it is very difficult to say what the net effect on any particular reward earner will be, but the goal here is not in fact to increase or decrease rewards going to any particular person or group of people, it is to make Steem work better to stop or reverse the slide into obscurity and ultimately failure. Yes I'm sure there will be some net winners and losers but at this point I'm not even sure who they are.
Why does everyone keep repeating what the goal is to me as though it's an argument? The goal is laudable, it's the means I disagree with.
Then you did not understand the system properly because DPoS has defined governance which explicitly allows for voted hard forks which change the rules. Some rules have a higher to much higher social barrier to being changed such as forks which would take your coins away, or forks which increase inflation (effectively taking them away via a back door). But changes to the allocation of and reductions to the amount of rewards have both happened before. You had no reason to expect or demand that something which already happened before can't happen again (and many things which haven't happened may also happen in the future).
Non-voluntary would be taking coins out of your balance and as I said above, this has a much higher social barrier to ever happening. Future rewards are not that.
It is ultimately a judgment call. You get a vote (via choosing witnesses who share your judgment or conclusions). Please use it.
I have voted, just not for any of the current Top 20, and I wouldn't ever based on this circus some people call a process.
Good, that is the system working as intended.
I'm not so sure if that's a good thing considering my - and many other's - level of discontent.
I'm not saying I'm happy about discontent, but frankly a degree of discontent is inevitable when things generally aren't going all that well for the platform as a whole. In an ideal world, everything about Steem would have been done perfectly from the start and it be well on its way to taking over the world by now. We don't live in that world. Beyond that, it becomes a series of tradeoffs. If you act decisively, then people who want a more conservative and methodical approach will be pissed off, and vice versa. But as I said, you get to express your views through voting and have some influence along with others who are like minded to potentially make a change. I still don't think that will please everyone, but it's how things are supposed to work.
I didn't say you were happy about the discontent, but it does look like you're throwing your hands up and levelling platitudes at genuine critiques of the system and proposed solutions. I have voted and I find those in control unworthy of their position and I think the proposed solutions and the methods by which they were conceived to be half-baked and shoddy.
I'm not really sure what you expect. Do you really think that people who have put various forms of effort into Steem for 3+ years, people with million of dollars (in some cases perhaps tens of millions), and a community of probably tens of thousands of regular users and a larger number of occasional users are suddenly going to change their whole approach because @distantsignal has shown up and has 'better' ideas how it should all be done?
Your ideas and input are absolutely valid as well as your votes, and I'm sure they will be considered in the mix along with many, many other ideas and views on the best approaches to use.