re: next decent level

Well, you can check that out by going to penguinpablo's steemnow.com, as it is one of the places you can find an upvote calculator. Just plug in some numbers in the Steem Power window and see if you can find what makes a difference to you.

re: dropped 13!

Yeah, it's kind of a pain, but it's far worse when you don't have much to begin with, so no worries. I can still do some spreading, just not as much, and it is annoying. :)

re: nobody know about it?

I think the knowledge is around. Tim Cliff, who is a witness, is the one who ignited this last round of posts and comments simply because he was trying to find a solution for spammers. However, it involved raising the dust vote threshold and since the vast majority of us are now newbies, it obviously didn't sit very well. Dustsweeper pretty much came out of that.

The problem is, the information on this and other topics aren't really centrally located unless it shows up in either white or blue papers. I haven't been back through either to see if it is or not, but people said it wasn't there.

I'm sure someone has written about it, or it's appeared in a steemitblog update of some kind, but it would have been over six months and more ago when most of us weren't here.