The day of the prophecy is coming, and soon. I have seen the portents in the blockchain that show me that the hardfork 19 is coming soon, most likely when the stars align on the 20th of June.

What is a Hard fork?

A hard fork is a change in the way that the Steem software (the blockchain itself, not just the steemit site). The witnesses can choose to install the new software of not, as they see fit. (As far as I know most if not all the current witnesses have already installed the HF19 software).

What does this hard fork actually change?

I am sure that there are some general bug-fixes, refinements and performance improvements in there, but the most significant changes coming are:

Linear Voting Curve

This means that the amount one contributes when voting is directly proportional to the amount of SP they have. This will give a slight boost to the minnows and dolphins.

Increased Vote Impact

After HF19, a 100% vote will be worth around 4 times what it is now, but this also means that voting power will go down more quickly (basically each 100% vote will decrease your voting power by 2%, with about 20% of the voting power regenerating a day.)

The 2% is of your current voting power, so it will never go to zero.

An Example

Lets say you have 1000 SP, you vote with a 100%, so the first vote will have an effective power of 1000SP. The Second one after that will get only 980 SP, since you used up 2%. The one after that will get 960.4... and so on.

Anyway, that is just my understanding, and my attempt to allay the fears of the coming hardfork... Steem has already survived 18 of those, and this one will not be any different