Why the change from 40 to 5 votes is terrible for us small fish.

There are all these threads and arguments about how great this new system based on 5 votes instead of 40 a day will be. Well as a small fish this is going to kill my steem use for many reasons.

1. The big argument for this is you can still vote as much as you want but at reduced power. This is not true. You only get the slider to choose your voting power if you have high enough steem power. This means 99% of the people will be limited to 5 votes a day or eventually go to 0 voting power and be unable to vote.

2. Small fish have little chance of getting a curation reward. Unlike the bigger fish are SP is so diluted that we not only have to vote at the right time on a thread but hope that thread both makes enough that are small cruation reward is over .001 and that someone bigger doesn't vote and knock are percentage of the curation to 0%. Even with 40 votes and 115 SP I'm lucky to get 4 or 5 small curation rewards a day. We are talking pennies or less here. Now divide that by 8 and maybe get a curation of a few pennies every 2 days.

3. Comments. People rarely vote on comments now with 40 votes who thinks anyone will vote on them with 5? It's also nice when someone makes a comment you like on one of your threads to vote for that comment. This will not be possible with only 5 votes. Only the 1% will be able to vote on comments in their thread giving them an advantage of drawing more people to their threads and keep them active so they get even more of the limited votes.

4. Flagging. Right now I use several of my votes each day to fight spam. That will no longer be possible. Flagging will be for the 1%. Spam and plagiarism fighting will slowly grind to a halt while bots create more and more accounts and overwhelm those in the 1% who do try to fight the abuse.

5. Bots. I have heard over and over this is going to be a blow to bots. Well simple math tells me it will not. Bots with little SP will have their votes cut but those bot owners can just create 8x the bots to compensate and still have those 40 votes. Bots with SP can just set their voting to 12.5% or even less and have 40 or more votes a day. Bots can adjust rapidly to any changes. People take time.

6. Usability. The average user and new people don't know about SP or don't want to bother with all the settings. They just want to read, comment and vote. Now they will have to constantly check their SP, count their votes, and worst of all ration them. How many will say I love this but I'm not going to vote on it because something better may come along in the next few hours? How many higher power people will want to set power on every vote?

7. Pay to play. You want to vote and enjoy steemit? You better be well know and get the votes from the 1% with the power or buy your right to have votes. I think this is really a way to try to make people buy steem power. People have been powering down and cashing out and the price of steem is down. Make people need to buy steem to use the site and try to drive the price back up. Makes steemit look like a pyramid scheme even more. The 1% are climbing better add another tier and keep them down.

8. Censorship. Limiting voting for one group (in this case the majority) and not another group is censorship. You can spin it anyway you want but it's still censoring the ability of the majority to state their opinion by voting.

Let's finish this off with some numbers. From what I have read the cutoff to get the slider is around 310SP. I'm not a writer so I have been making small posts, commenting, and voting. Most of my SP came from comments and converting my SBD to steem power from that. It's taken me almost 2 months to get to 116SP even with mining. Now I would need almost 3x that to get the slider to get my votes back so another 4 months stuck with 5 votes a day. Even longer since the chance of getting a curation reward will be 1/8 of what it is now and comment rewards will be next to nonexistent. Even worse with this user experience I will probably just leave and I'm sure a lot of others will too.

Now take a look at the trending page right now. The top 10 posts have a total of 2902 votes. How will this look after the changes? Giving the benefit of the doubt and going with the active in the last 24 hours percentage instead of all users about 10% will be able to vote more than 5 times so 90% of those will have their votes cut. Those 10 posts could be reading as 616 votes between them. Yes this is so variably it can be argued to death but the point is that the top trending posts could have as few as 60 votes. People are going to look at that and say who even uses this site? Really though I think you will see just as many votes in those top 10 where it will hurt is every little content creator. People will vote with the money and all the small fish trying to crate content will suffer. Those with SP and who are already popular will get more so. The rich and famous get even richer and more famous.

I can see my average day if this goes into effect. Vote on my thread (if I bother to make one anymore). Vote on my friends threads. Have 1 vote left and keep that just in case another friend makes an article. Possibly use it before I got to bed. Go from hours a day browsing, commenting, and voting on steemit to a few minutes when someone links in chat then go back to reddit where I can comment and vote as much as I want. I'll be making the same both places after all........

So do you small fish still think the 40 to 5 vote a day change is a good idea?