RE: Life Ain't "Fair" and Neither Is Steem. Deal with It and Self-Vote Away.
What you don't understand, since you have been up on high for some time, is what it's like to be down here at the bottom. The vote power now decays so fast that the default self-vote post takes away your ability to even give a cent to anyone. We are campaigning for the abolition of self voting primarily to allow new users to not have to read a war and peace to learn how to interact on the new platform. They dish out likes as they are used to, and before they know it, they have no more.
I and everyone who has been here long enough, especially the more technically minded, realise that more advanced users can always skirt such a ban. So you think that means it should not be implemented? That's not the point. Not only that, you should realise, and this really is why you are getting cranky, is that being forced to go to this extra effort to defend your right to assign yourself rewards out of the pool, is going to both be diminished, and become more blatantly antisocial to the rest of the community.
If we let things continue your way, there will be a second round of massive attrition of the userbase, your precious big Steem Power will again drop back to under a dollar a piece and what good has all your grasping done for you?
Friend, how do you think I got "up on high"? I mostly paid for it. I took my hard earned money and I used some of it to acquire SP. Why? Becasue I wanted to have more power and influence over Steem, including the power to help my personal posts get more exposure by means of upvoting.
And you, friend, could easily do the same. Take some of your hard earned money and buy more SP. If you can't afford that, then at least invest the time to post thoughtful comments that might earn you some SP. And, if you can't do either, then...why are you here? Or, more importantly, why do I care whether your are here or not?
Steem is a self-sustaining ecosystem. Looting is impossible and moochers will quickly get bored and move on. Consequently, the folks that stay around and who do well here will be those who add value to the ecosystem either by purchasing and holding SP (which supports the market price of Steem) or by contributing great content that earns Steem.
So, you may be right. There may be another round of "massive attrition" as the looters, moochers and trolls realize that there's no way for them to gain from the Steem ecosystem. But if history is any guide, they will be quickly replaced by actual contributors--productive Steemsters that add massive value to the ecosystem by posting good content and/or holding large quantities of SP.
Steem is the Galt's Gulch of the Internet, a haven for contributors and producers. Mere consumers are welcome (they will find some great content and amazing people here), but they can't loot and won't succeed by mooching or trolling. If many of them decide to move on, all the better.
I already did, it composes maybe 25% of the total that I got from powering down.
I consider promoting my own posts with votes to be both redundant and egotistical. So I don't do it. But I'm in a minority, and always have been with this. This didn't stop me from working my way up, without sacrificing my at the time, non-existing capital. I used my time, and my brain, instead.
The solution is not going to be either obvious, or, probably, as complicated as some think. I am continuing to use my brain to explore options, as you can see in my latest post. The changes in HF19 were not completely thought out, and the evidence is available for everyone to see.
Also, I think it can be debated extensively that sacrificing time and brain power is more costly than risking an easy to calculate amount of surplus capital monetary resources. It also happens to demand of the player, in this situation, more rigorous logic to defend the initiative usually born from a simple hunch, than the simple economic calculation of profit, loss and risk, simply because it is a far more complex set of variables. These are the things that our brains have evolved to solve, and the simple economic calculations are a product of that, not the computational process of our subconscious minds.