Hardfork day is approach in August 27th. This one has been contentious. Unfortunately not among the vaunted group of Steemians who control the fate of this platform. The top 20 witnesses. If it was contentious, they sure have not shared that with the community.

In many ways, my thoughts here will mean very little. So, read on if you’re curious but know that they will not change what is coming. You might gain some perspective though.

As I thought about my third anniversary here on the platform, I also found myself thinking about the various phases and changes it has gone through.

When I first arrived here, the reward split was 50/50. There was a super linear curve on those upvotes. Everyone had 40 votes each day to share. Few people actually used those votes. Those who did needed a lot of SP to even give a one cent vote. It meant the larger stakeholders needed to find and upvote good content for small stakeholders and newbies to gain a foothold.

As the price of Steem drifted downward toward seven cents the complaining about rewards, or lack of them, rose ever higher. Then the trending page wasn’t about posts being bid-bot up, they were about posts getting autovotes from large stakeholders on a regular basis no matter what they wrote.

There were large stakeholders actually out looking for and upvoting posts of smaller accounts. Some curation guilds formed. Some were really good about finding and upvoting deserving posts. Others were about circle-jerking themselves. After the ability to delegate arrived, that circle-jerking got even worse.

Then the idea of changing the reward curve gained traction. There was considerable debate over how it should be changed. A group of whales decided they would impose a version of the curve on their own. If a post was upvote over a certain level of megavests, this group would counter it with downvotes. Once again, smaller accounts getting a shot at growing was getting knocked down.

Eventually, the decision was made to make the curve linear and change the reward split to 75/25.

Bid-bots entered the picture. Fewer and fewer large stake holders continued to actually find and upvote posts to reward good content. They make more off of delegating to bots and didn’t have to spend the time actually working on making the platform content better.

Self-voting and bid-bots became a point of contention. The wrath of stakeholders of all sizes was visited largely on the smaller to mid-size accounts who self-voted or used bid-bots. The larger accounts could fight back when anyone tried to punish them.

It was easier to hit at the smaller guys. The ones who didn’t have enough stake to actual impact the platform like those large stake holders could. There were legit targets among the smaller ones. The spammers and vote farmers who used self-voting and circle jerks to draw off the reward pool for crap content.

Those two issues aside, it was possible for smaller accounts and newbies to grow if they created decent content and worked to a build a network. That is and has been a constant. The speed of that growth was the main factor.

HF20 came along. The introduction of RCs. An effort to stop the influx of spammers and set the platform up for better scaling down the road. The immediate impact was on smaller accounts. They needed to be able to post and especially to be able to comment in order to grow on the platform.

They lacked enough RCs to to do either effectively. The community came to their aid. Smaller accounts showing promise received delegations from other members to get them up on their feet.

Once again the price was drifting downward. Once again the complaining and the finger pointing was rising. This time the prime target was the reward split. The push was to return to the 50/50 of before. Changing the reward curve and allowing free downvotes became part of the package. Since the authors were taking a hit, the witnesses decided they could take a second one part of their reward pool would fund the SPS.

The change to the reward curve is not going to be as super linear as the first one was. It will be superlinear and then move toward linear. While the previous one was totally in favour of the large stakeholders getting larger, this one has at least some effort to give the smaller accounts a chance. The question is, will it?

As we move toward HF21 there is a lot of hype around how everyone should be downvoting. How downvoting is the way to go in order to support Steem and make things work.

Get your eye off the wrong ball people.

Focusing on those downvotes, the small guys self-voting and using bid bots gets the attention of who really needs to be stepping up to the plate to do their part. Those large stakeholders with their stake delegated to bid-bots who should be removing those delegations and getting busy doing what they claimed was going to happen.

They claimed that making the curation rewards 50/50 would be incentive for them to manually curate and seek out good content. The silence about them actually stepping up to do that is deafening.

Large stakeholders?? Are you removing delegations so you can roll up your sleeves and get to work or aren’t you?

We’re waiting to hear from you. Actions speak louder than words and we’re not seeing either yet.