Each discussion goes through a two stage payout. The first one is nearly identical to what currently happens on a new discussion except that we are weighting payout times by 12 hours instead of 24. This should cycle through currently trending content quicker. There is a second voting period set to 30 days after the first payout. This should help posts that don't have immediate viral success accumulate votes and have more consistent payouts in the long run.

This addresses an issue I brought up a while back about how posts of high quality which don't get noticed right away are not being rewarded according to long term value. I mentioned back then that it could create an incentive to create low quality but eye catchy posts because the attention span is only set to 24/hrs. This new 30 day tweak is interesting and I suppose it's worth a try to see what happens. At the same time the weighted payout time is 12 hours instead of 24 hours? Why change that?

After the second payout a discussion becomes "frozen". The discussion is no longer editable and new replies are disabled. Users can still vote on comments in these discussions as a "nod" to the author without costing their posting power or awarding reward shares.

I definitely definitely disagree with that. Why kill a perfectly alive discussion? I've seen Reddit discussions which last for many months if not years. I've seen discussions on Bitcointalk last for years. I don't think rewards should be cut off either, because again this changes the incentives in a way which can have unintended consequences.

The rest of the changes are uncontroversial to me. In my opinion, even by changing the incentives the quality of posts will not go up just because you lower the frequency. In fact quality might even go down because there is less frequency and that could mean less diversity as people might not be willing to take risks.

The other decision, the 30 day voting period, okay this is interesting. But then they freeze the discussion arbitrarily, which I can't find any rational benefit to doing that. If a conversation were the type which could go on for years then it would force the participants to create an entirely new thread every month to continue to converse and it would not change anything else in any beneficial way that I can see.

I suppose if resources are limited then it could be considered a form of rationing? But at this time Steem doesn't seem like it's having a problem growing or with resources. Long term it might, but right now it doesn't.