With the target changing from 40 votes to 5, a single 100% upvote is now 8x stronger, making minnows feel like their vote makes more of a difference.
In order for the above statement to be true (its not), the 5 vote cap will have to decrease the total number of Rshares voted to 1/8th of its former total (it wont).
In order to decrease it by that much, it would have to cause an accross the board decrease in votes cast. This will not. Since, as you say, this will not change how the whales do things, there will still be the same (or nearly the same) number of rshares cast.
So for example, lets say right now the voting is distributed thus:
total reward pool (for curation and blogging)
40K
10 whales voting 5 times a day for 50 votes, each worth 600rshares each =30,000rshares
10000 minnows and dolphins, each voting 20 times a day, worth an average of 50c=10,000rshares
In this system, whales would distribute 30K of the 40k with their votes and non-whales 10K.
Under the new system, as you say whales won't change theyll still cast 5 votes a day, at 600 r shares each= 30,000 rshares
However, the amount of votes cast by minnows, and dolphins will be quartered, Where the whlaes used to cast 30K/40K rshares, they will now cast 30K/32.5K
No, you can vote as much as you want, there is even a list of how the distribution works showing that this is not the case. Saying it's "only 5" is false.
Yes, you can vote as many times as you want, but with decreasing power. The target vote amount is the number of votes that maximizes your impact (iiuc). If the minnows and dolphins in the example above voted more than 5 times a day, their decreased power would decrease the effect of their votes in terms of rshares awarded by them. A change from 10k/40K to 2.5/40K is the absolute best they could hope for.. voting any more than 5 times would actually decrease their effect even further.
Your example uses a fixed amount of minnows voting. However if the number of minnows continue to grow, then by holding the whales to a smaller amount of votes, their rshares should be a smaller amount of the rshares already cast.
Not really, because the amount of vote power the minnows have is so small even if they tripled they wouldnt have a significant impact on the total number of rshares cast.
I added some info from another post I recently found, maybe that will clear some things up:
https://steemit.com/steemit/@krnel/why-5-votes-and-the-vote-bar-is-good-for-steemit#@krnel/re-krnel-why-5-votes-and-the-vote-bar-is-good-for-steemit-20160903t042829909z
I think you might have posted the wrong link... that link just goes to the response with the link.