I'm quite optimistic about the future of Steem and Steemit and an ecouraging piece of news is the new hardfork coming up - hardfork 0.19.0 a.k.a. Equality. It's named so for a good reason that makes the future growth of the platform even more likely.

The Best News: Linear Rewards

The biggest news about this hardfork called Equality is the new Linear Rewards. This means that the exponential curve in calculating voting power is no longer the case and the voting power will be directly proportional to the Steem Power that is vested into an account. In other words, the Whale votes are becoming less heavy and the Minnow votes are going to gain a bit more oomph. Equality is a great name for this hardfork because from now one each Steem Power point will have exactly the same weight when voting while in the past, the Steem held by bigger accounts weighted more in voting.

This will allow new accounts that are currently registering at record pace to be able to make more difference which in turn will hopefully convince more newcomers (like myself) to stay for the long run.

I'm personally quite happy and optimistic about this change and I think it will make the platform more democratic and meritocratic. I'm sure the previous model has actually played a part in the platform staying stable and has encouraged many whales to remain vested, but the new rules (effective June 20, 2017) would hopefully encourage more grassroots growth.

And if the platform is growing, all of us will be benefiting.

What's Changing While Not Really Changing: Curation Rewards

While the smaller accounts will gain equal voting rights, their ability to earn from curation will not be boosted and will remained stalling. The curve for that has been changed and now uses a square root parameter which basically adjusts it back to the old situation. If I understand this correctly, whales will keep earning exponentially more than new accounts instead of linearly. This will keep the platform profitable for the whales, so they will still have an incentive to remain invested while new accounts would have to look to building a following and gathering steem through authorship.

I don't know if this should be interpreted as good or bad but there is certainly logic behind it. I personally would love to see curation become leaner too. I think each steem power unit should have the same voting power and earning potential, no matter how large a pool it is part of, but I don't know if this is the right attitude and I'd be very happy to hear other opinions.

Increased Voting Impact

Each vote one makes will be quadrupled. So one would be able to make 4 times less votes, but each vote will have 4 times more impact. I think this is going to make it easier for regular folks and newcomers to have more impact on the platform as I'm sure many real people don't manage to make 40 meaningful votes per day (I sure don't). This means that each of us will have less votes to work with but it will be easier to use up your voting power and therefore make us of it. I personally think this will level the playing field even more and bots will have less of an edge in that regard as well.

Bug Fixes and Minor Improvements

Of course as any software update, this new hardfork comes with a number of other fixes to make it all smoother and to get rid of known bugs here and there. Of course, the above changes are much more impactful, but making the code better is always good news too.