RE: HF19: Who's Building a Following and Who's Relying on Whale Votes?
After some thinking I am not as enthusiastic as others concerning HF 19. My preliminary conclusion is that ...
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I completely agree that the linear reward curve is a big step in the right direction.
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However I doubt that it was a great idea to increase the impact of a 100 % vote by a factor of 4 (whereby voting power would decrease faster per upvote).
It means that you can reward some friends (or some strong accounts from which you hope to receive some loyalty votes back ...or ... yourself ... or ... your other accounts ...!) very rich, but then probably there is not much voting power available anymore for the 'rest'.
However with a fast growing number of Steemit users it may be better to spread many small votes instead a few huge ones (reserved for a few 'loyal' accounts).
Of course I hope I am wrong and both changes will have positive effects ...
For me, it's more about automated voting verses human voting. Yes, votes can be concentrated, but the way it was before (IMO) was that humans vote maybe 5-10 times while whale bots vote to the max. That's my hunch for how things go. Yes whales can still drop a huge vote, but because of the change to linear, it's not the ~1000x influence compared to smaller votes like it was before.
As I wrote, the linear curve is great. Concerning the rest, let's see ... I hope you are right ...
I as a 'human only' always voted a lot (especially also on comments). So at least for me 40 votes were no problem at all (for example I often had more than 20 comments on my chess quizzes and upvoted most of them). I know the changes are meant to help people who spend less time on Steemit ... but of course one could also argue that people who spend more time there may be more dedicated and thus should have a higher influence ... complicated topic, indeed ... :)
Actually I would say it IS the ~1000x influence now compared to ~1,000,000x influence before :p
I think for the 4x increase in voting power if users were really interested in just group voting among friends to reward each other, on the one hand you might argue it's their right to use their SP as they want to adjust the reward distribution, but with or without the 4x increase they could easily automate the process in either case, or if they don't automate, it's realistically the difference between 5 and 20 minutes of work a day which in either case would probably be a good return on investment if they have modest SP.
Just my random thought of the day! :)