Why Some Users Are Concerned About The Upcoming Hardfork
In less than 48 hours we are going to get forked, hard. The upcoming changes are pretty exciting but one of them is causing some concern. Hardfork 19 will have two big changes: a spreading of the voting power and a changing of how many votes you have at full power a day. From what I've seen, pretty much everyone is onbaord with the voting power being spread out more and personally I'm 110% for it. The more people with the more voting power the more growth you will see in the network (I need to get a copyright for that quote :p). So that, should, go over smoothly on Tuesday. But the second change, changing our 40 daily votes to 10, is getting met with caution. And there may be good reason for this as less votes might lead to less users getting seen. Here are the pros and cons of the change.
PROS:
Less work. This means people only have to do 10 votes a day to fully utilize their steem power. In theory, this should lead to less people boting as people can take the time to find 10 posts to support. It will also be easier for people to get their curating rewards. This change should also lead to people posting less (which can be a con as it leads to less posts that show up on Google). When there are only so many votes to go around, it is probably less likely you will get an upvote for multiple posts on a day and this can see people gravitating towards less posts when things settle.
CONS:
Less work. This might be a purely psychological thing, but 10 votes is barely enough time to get into curating. People can just click 10 posts on the trending page and go on with their day. But the biggest problem, and the one, I think, is causing users to be concerned, is this might discourage people from supporting smaller authors. With only ten upvotes, what is to stop people from only liking the most popular stuff? There is no room for other people. And on top of that, people will be upvoting for themselves, so that is even less votes to go around.
Keep in mind people can still cut their votes to 25% to get the same experience as they have today, but, as of Tuesday, the default 100% vote will be 4x s powerful and 4x as draining to your account. Also, please keep in mind that hardforks are major changes BUT THAT DON'T HAVE TO BE PERMANENT ONES. We can always go back to the way things were or take off the second change in a future hardfork.
*my upvotes/rep disclaimer: https://steemit.com/steemit/@whatageek/my-steemit-account-where-i-stand-on-bots-self-votes-and-multiple-account
How do you feel about the second change?
I'm really more concern about spreading of voting power. Liniar way of doing that is no good. Self voting will be a probem. Especially with 4x bump in max voting weight. Why would I curate anymore?
I for one think these will be good changes. I curate at all hours of the day and even after hardfork will very rarely use a full 100% vote. I have been using up to 30% of my Voting Power max and may adjust it slightly after the fork by a bit. People will need to get a feel for what works for them. Will cause you to use your 100% vote wisely
Yeah that is another positive I didn't add. It gives you more options on how you utilize the site. Also, on a side note, thank you for your support over the months, your manual curating has been a big help to get me to this point.
No worries brother, you are a great part of this community thankful to have you here.
Great post and very informative @whatageek I think for some it will change the way they vote meaning, for better content, etc. While others will keep doing what they are doing now. Can't leave out the self voting! Either way I don't have enough SP to curate! But I do enjoy writing and community building! @thejohalfiles I want to thank you too. I am very aware and appreciate everything on here. :) So Thank You!
@whatageek thank you too.
uh, I get shy writing thank you posts like this. lol ok TTYL
I'm curious to see what the hardfork will change in upvoting behavior.
Always (manually) upvoting your content too.
I think you are the type of "dolphin" we need around here!
Interesting times ahead!
The only problem I see is that most people will just use 100% POWER on the top 10 posts, we will be seeing the same people at the top of the trending part... No bitching here.... i just got to step my game up lol
With all the support that the Steemit community is showing to new users, I would't worry about votes going to the most popular posts. I think most "older" users understand that the most important thing now is to make as many people as possible join Steemit.
First of all, the second change does not limit you to 10 votes a day, although if you vote more than that, it will take longer than a day for the voting power to recover. The decrease is also always proportional to your remaining voting power, so you will never hit zero.
It will be interesting to see what the impact will be on the site as a whole. i think that most people will simply continue voting as they always have.
As for me personally, I am still thinking about that. I will probably stay with 100% on my manual voting, but decrease the automated ones.
Thanks for this great post it really taught me a lot :D I am worried that it will effect my growth as i am 14 years old and really like the idea of benefiting from using my social media skills. Although i think that young people like me should use steemit because they use a lot of time on the internet and social media :)
Thanks :p
What I heard is that all the people will get the power menu bar, even minnows... correct me if i'm wrong, still a newbie here :)
Thanks for the info. Really useful content. Let's hope it'll be better. :D
In theory this is a good change bad content will be upvotes less, newer accounts get more power and Steem continues to grow. In practice I'm extremely worried we'll end up with top accounts using 10 votes on each other, profiting and closing new accounts out of the system. This would eventually lead to a decrease in users and Steem price.
The hope is whales will think things through, continue helping good content be seen and everyone remains happy. Initially I have no doubt this will happen just as time goes on we need to be wary of getting lazy and using our votes to quickly make a buck.
Nice post buddy, I think some people are moving into lite coin and eth untill the hardfork is over. Good chance both eth and ltc will rise due to this.
I went on a hiatus through the last fork and flag phase. I intend to weather through this one.