RE: Steemit Statistics Week 6 - 0.14.0 Update and more...
Target Votes per day Reduced from 40 to 5: This will directly affect the voting power of bots and active curation user. This is something that will benefit normal users, and hurt active users. This is something which will certainly reduce the number of votes, however will create a more engaged audience at the same time.
Do we really want to discourage active users from actively using the platform? It's one thing to try to penalize bot abuse, (but they will just rewrite the code) it's another thing to discourage actively using steemit. People are upset that their posts only get a few votes now, it will be much worse when they start getting no votes on every post.
And that will be the result. Vast numbers of posts with no votes. Followed quickly by vast numbers of formally active users with abandoned accounts. I cannot think of any single change that will more quickly kill steemit than this one.
I'm on the other side of the argument here @gregory-f
That being said, from what I have seen, this is a topic which will probably divide much of the community. I can see the other side of the argument. I however believe anything that levels the playing field will be good for Steemit in the long term..
Active users will still be rewarded handsomely for their efforts. I believe this will be a positive change, however only time will tell...
Thanks for your post @gregory-f
I do see your point, and I don't necessarily disagree. First, a level playing field is a great thing, unless it's also empty. Second, I thing negatively impacting the bots is a good thing, they mostly vote for the same "made man" group of posters anyway. My biggest concern though is for the newly arrived Steemian, washed up on our vast shores without a friend or follower in the world. Working hard on his first, second, third maybe even fourth post. All for naught. Because everyone is husbanding their precious few upvotes waiting for the clouds to part and a brief ray of sun to shine on the next great post and lead them hand in hand to the glory land. Or something like that.
The PR for this change has been awful. What the change means is that now, each of your votes will use up more of your voting power than it did before. This runs your voting power down faster, but it makes each of your votes more powerful. This is the detail that the devs keep forgetting to mention.
The other detail that they don't explain well is that if you vote 40 times per day under the new rules, each of your votes will be worth the same as they are right now (before the new rules start). If you vote a lot, you don't hurt yourself - you just spread out your influence over a larger number of votes.
But sadly, the devs have never known how to explain this stuff, so people are going to freak out and vote less.
I think that this change has been a bit poorly communicated and thus largely misunderstood. Active users (who are thought to be the ones suffering from this change) can keep on voting just like before by changing the slider to a smaller percentage. Now I also think that Ned said something like you need some amount of Steem or Steem Power to get to use the slider, which is a bit unfortunate. Then again there is the upside of keeping the UI simpler for new users. Maybe best of both worlds could be had by having the slider as an option (off as default).
When it comes to the practical effects of the change, we need to look at what percentage the human users normally have their voting power, on average. The closer that average is to 100%, the worse off normal users are when compared to the bots (as bots can easily use all their available voting power). If this change gets the average user to use more of their voting power on average, then the bots lose some of their comparative power.
The tragedy of the failed communication in this case is that people are actually getting exactly what they want and have been asking for (less power to bots, more power to human users). Still, because the numbers are a bit complicated, there is a widespread misunderstanding and people think they are getting the exact opposite of what is actually happening. It will be really interesting to see what will actually happen, but I think that the net effect should be positive (more even distribution of Steem).