I am losing 185K STEEM under this proposal, a reduction of approximately 72%. The statement that bots are the biggest losers is incorrect. I played by the rules, not only the literal rules, but also very much within the intent of the rules. I never used any bot or automated system whatsoever. I devoted my time and effort to carefully evaluating posts, authors and promising topics on the site to promote. A significant portion of the time I evaluated new posters, I would find that they were plagiarizing material and not only would I not upvote them, but I would downvote them, costing myself voting power for no reward. My votes on some promising new posters and categories were risky, in that I did not know at the time they would become popular. Some did, though some did not.

In summary I do not support the retroactive change. I support 'flattening' changes going forward, though I don't know for sure this specific proposal will be a positive overall, as flatting undermines some of the subtler aspects of the incentive structure that holds the design together. Hopefully the degree of flattening will not be excessive, nor with the changes introduce some other unintended but undesirable consequences, but in any case could be modified again (just not retroactively).

I likewise do not support cutting the portion of the reward fund that is going to SP holders as a group from 50% to 25%. Those who vest into SP are locked in for two years. It is in effect a retroactive change if the future benefits to the SP asset class are reduced after people have vested under the previous rules.

Furthermore, independent of fairness issues, IMO the shift of 25% from curator rewards to content and comment rewards is misguided. Consider that, if this change is made, reversing it would cut aggregate content rewards by only 33% but would double curator rewards. The latter would likely be far more noticeable to the affected users in the latter group than the former (that is, those who primarily vote but don't post or comment much). To see a more extreme example of this effect for illustration, imagine that reward funds were shifted to 99% content, 1% curation. We could then propose to cut content rewards by less than 4% and at the same time quintuple curation rewards. Thus any such shift away from 50-50 is questionable when considering the asymmetric perceived impact from the perspective of users in different classes.

I am very active in commenting on many platforms, so this last remark is not particularly self-serving. I would likely personally receive significant comment rewards. Instead it is based on an observation that there are many people on every platform I've ever used who read and vote (when voting is available) but do not comment much if at all. That is simply the nature of how different people use these sites. For example, in forums with an international audience where posting is English-dominated, people may be avid readers and community members, but choose not to speak much because they are not comfortable writing English. Voting rewards can be a big draw and very inclusive; I see no good user-focused reason to cut them in half just to add incrementally to posting and comment rewards.