HF20 is in the works, and is mostly about paving the way for growth.

I completely agree with you about HF19. The bulk of the problem isn't that rewards are being calculated linearly, rather than exponentially (this is a good thing), but that VP decays 400% faster.

We can only cast 10 votes a day before our VP begins to decay, so most people have got in the habit of simply not voting. This kills curation, and that kills Steemit.

@liberosist proposed reversing the decay curve, so that we'd get about 100 votes at full power, and then it would rapidly decline. Since bots can vote thousands of times a day, this would cause bots to be restricted to what people can do curating, but also let people vote for the content they like again.

Since there are 10 times more posts now than there were when HF19 was first being discussed, just how cutting the number of votes by 400% would affect Steemit was underestimated by 1000%. This is a major problem - much worse than exponential VP weighting, because it affects everyone, no matter how small their vote is.

Exponential weighting most affected whales, because math, and this was a bad thing, because it emphasized unfairness, which people really don't like. Curation is crashing, and this is debasing Steemit, and particularly new accounts, who are trying to build networks, which they need to do by commenting and voting.

If they can't vote, and they can't get folks to reciprocate by voting their posts, then they're going nowhere, and that's discouraging.

I'd say HF20 needs to fix VP decay more than anything else. I have noted elsewhere that Steemit, like people, only gets one chance to make a first impression, and if people get frustrated because they can't get votes on their posts and comments, they'll give up.

Most will never look back, even if HF21 fixes things perfectly. So, we need to fix VP decay before we onboard a bunch of new people, or we're going to blow many of those new people off, and that will really hurt Steemit's growth.

HF20 is about things that need to happen, but the changes to how new accounts are funded, and etc., aren't going to help if those people can't get votes.

Thanks for keeping this topic front and center, because it's more important to be ready to grow, than it is to start growing, whether Steemit is ready to grow or not.