First question, do you mean minnow by minnow or you wanted to say plankton which is the newly created accounts' level. (Under 500SP.) Which took me 9 months to achieve. In this case it doesn't make much difference tho, because even minnows has quite limited with the interactions, I got 600SP and had to lease some after HF20 in total of 1200SP I'll be able to comment max 18 times a day, without any votes or transactions. Since then I'm looking for some casual games because I know I can't use this place with an almost $1k investment. Are you kidding? (not you :))
Yes HF allows dApps to bring people to ecosystem but who would invest in a system in day one? In current situation without the calibration (equilibration) newly created account is only allowed to power up. They don't have 14M RC. Yes bots not going to make it but also the real people won't make it. I've talked to many dolphins/whales, asked them if they invested or just grow their account. 80% said they grow with 0 investment. Whoever invested is gave a number of $500 top and it's not from the day 1.
And please stop losing empathy, when you were a newbie. You think you worked hard to get where you are, but when you were a newbie, there wasn't that much competition, people trying to tie people around here so they were much more generous etc. It's much harder these days of course if you want be ethic. (these "you" also not you.)
With quality content and quality curators.
Sorry but we don't have it, we are looking a peaceful feed right now just because bid-bots also lost their power during the process. When they came back to full power, we are going to face the rich people spam again.
This RC thing, will solve the spam with the comments, and many tags but those were already easy to get rid of, it would only take a minnows 1% flag. Is this going to solve rich people's spam and ROI methods? Does an investor bothered with the comment spam or the guys who riots the front-page.
Steem called ponzi in many places, now this change also back this argument. Because poor one were able to earn some, now they lose that chance as well. But rich ones (early birds) will be able to take from the pool as much as they want. And this path shows us it's going to be worse. A week before everyone free to do whatever they want, today planktons unable to speak freely, tomorrow minnows will be under barrier. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Now I'm a 9 month steemian thinking about setting a curation bot and leaving the account still.
Oh, lastly I don't think we have any impact on steem price. I never check how much money going through exchange accounts on steem on daily basis but I don't think it's enough volume to affect it.