So I've written a lot about complicated parts of this, and I thought I'd try to make it a little simpler, to show what's being lost from post rewards. One of the things that's going to change is that author rewards will be completely capped at 75%.

This makes it possible to roughly estimate how much someone will lose by just looking at their past payouts and dividing. The actual effect will doubtlessly be smaller, because most voters who are voting early to help authors earn more will eventually learn not to, and voting behavior will change away from early voting at all. But this can give us a rough guess.

I'm starting with @silentscreamer because she brought it up on the last post, and because she's an ideal candidate for a control. Marica is a successful Steemian who got there without doing a lot of peering under the hood. She's the poster we want to advertise to the world - come to Steemit, be excellent, make money! She doesn't bot-vote, and she self-votes early but her vote isn't very big - two cents or so. The vast majority of her support is organic. As far as I know there's nobody specifically targeting her for support at minute-zero; she passed up an opportunity to apply for my program so that users without as much established support could have the spots instead.

She also uses beneficiaries a lot, which screws up the calculations, but I found a post without any. On this post of a total value of $35.24, Marica ended up with $27.85 rather than the $26.43 she would have gotten under the HF20 system. That's $1.42 that will just go away under the new plan - 4% of her post's value. If you voted on that post, only 96% of your vote would actually go to it.

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I promise I did not pick this example already knowing it was there. I only knew that I was supporting @luzcypher and the Open Mic contest with minute-zero autovotes, and that some other people were too. The result here startled me.

Luz doesn't self-vote, and doesn't bot-vote. The only reason these posts have early votes on them is because of people like me who value the Open Mic contest and want to support it. This is entirely the community deciding that he deserves more author rewards, and the community has been super-effective. Of $48.57 total post value, Luz ended up with a whopping $45.23, or 93%. Under HF20 he would only receive $36.42, a decline of $8.81, 18% of the post rewards going away completely.

Not only is that a huge number but it's huge for Open Mic, because under HF20 there's no way for us to modify our votes to get that money back. If we all vote after 15 minutes we'll get it ourselves in curation rewards, but it won't go to Luz and it won't go to the Open Mic prizes. Since every Open Mic week involves seven posts, that's a ton of money that won't be within the Open Mic ecosystem.

I honestly did not go into this post thinking I was going to find new information that made me think it was worse. Wow.

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The third example is my own post. This post was the culmination of a series of experiments with exploiting this bug based on self-voting and chaining bot votes. I'm not doing it maximally, because I limit myself to a few discounters rather than using bid-bots, but I worked pretty hard to hit the post early with a big vote and then hit it late with several large adjusted votes to get more profit out of them. Because of this the goal was to have the largest total amount go to me rather than the largest percentage, but the effect is still pretty big.

Of $250.18 on the post I ended up with $212.30, or 85%. Under HF20 I would have gotten $187.63. So the adjustment would have taken $24.67 away from the post - a little less than 10%. Naturally I'm not actually going to be doing that under HF20, however.

It's worth taking a look at your own posts to see how you'd do. Any post that has paid out will have this display, and any post that doesn't give part of its rewards to a beneficiary (like dTube, Busy, Steempress, etc.) can be easily calculated this way.