EDIT: It has been brought to my attention that the hardfork is not today, but we are left in the dark about when and if, making the rest of my letter still as applicable as if it was going to happen.

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Dear Steemit friends and followers,

I don’t expect you to upvote this or anything I post.

Especially after today’s hard fork.

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As you know one of the biggest changes is the Vote Balancing.

“Rebalanced target votes per day from 40 to 5. Votes will still regenerate over a 5 day period, so an account can vote 25 times sporadically before incurring large penalties to voting power, or 5 times daily. The goal of this change is to redistribute where the voting power is coming from. There are currently a few whales that vote often and many more than vote far under 40 votes per day. Accounts are too often at 100% vote power. Every block that an account is at 100% vote power is lost potential. The goal is to get as many accounts under 100% vote power at all times. This should lead to rewards being spread out due to the lack of consensus among whales as to what defines quality content.”

My view is that this will limit social interaction on steemit and cause more people to spend less time here creating a de facto killing of the “social” in this “social media” platform

I’ve already remarked how if you are not a “blogger” or writer of somekind, then the social aspects are slim here to begin with and this site is not like other social media (and not in a good way).

@theoretical wrote an article Learning to love the voting power equilibrium point change which he defends this change, all in the name of “fairness”.

Despite what we were told that if you Power Up and “invest” more your vote and voice is worth more, which was always inherently “unfair”, yet fair due to the commitment made.

Side Note: @theoretical used @biophil’s “leaky bucket analogy” which he may or may not have done so knowingly. This brings up an inherent problem I have with steemit because there is NO notification system if you mention other users. So even if @theoretical did credit @biophil, @biophil would have to have stumbled upon @theoretical’s article to even know…

My champion responder is @williambanks who had this to say (in part):

“Well congratulations. You've now killed any reason to keep curating manually. And you've turned voting up commentary and content you agree with into a mandatory business decision.”

"In fact you've specifically stated that some hipster twatbeard who hops on and spends 5 minutes to upvote 5 posts is MORE valuable to the platform than those of us who are treating the platform like it's their day job.”

“Upvoting and following is how we mortals, BUILD social networks. Upvoting IS how we show appreciation to people who say some insightful stuff whether we agree or not. With enough opportunities to upvote, it doesn't matter if we toss a few "appreciation votes" at our friends and even a few at our "frenemies".”

"Now instead of 40 chances a day to spread a bit of recognition around, I get 5. Yeah sure I can use the slider. But then if I do that, I have to mentally justify that decision. This is mental loading and turns upvoting into tipping which is exactly what you said you didn't want.”

“The correct solution is modify the weights so votes regenerate MUCH faster.”

"A full power vote every 30 mins would increase engagement to crack like levels of addiction.
With more votes to spread around, more stuff gets upvoted. Sure it dilutes the hell out of the $10k daily posts. But it also raises the value of everyone else who is seeking some little bit of recognition or validation.
It also causes the redistribution to suddenly become much more fair, because there are no more $10k posts but hundreds of $100 posts and thousands of $10 - $90 posts, and maybe millions of $1 posts.”

“But with a choice of only 5 a day, or having to mentally justify a change to weight on that slider "just in case", it is going to put mental loading into the equation that will just reduce how often I choose to vote. It makes us stingier, because now it's no longer an emotional decision, it's a business decision.”

"The end result of this change is that all voting turns into a simple calculation of $/hr based exclusively on the bonus amount of the post. With almost no votes for commentary (which yeah is how I and several others make the bulk of our money).”

"Sadly the math will be hard for a human, but trivial for a bot.
That's the curators side, but the content creators side just got much, much worse!”

“The part you're missing here is that steem and SBD only have the value WE impart to it.”

The post eventually got @dantheman’s attention and he responded with:

“If bob is a bot who spends 4 milliseconds curating you will see the reality of what we are trying to balance.”

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Admittedly, I am not a developer, programmer, nor blockchain expert, but couldn’t we implement voting balance changes that impact just bots and not regular everyday users like us?

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That may be a “simplified” solution, but without something that throws the rest of us into chaos as we fret over supporting our friends and follows, now we, as @williambanks pointed out, we have to “mentally justify that decision” which means less voting because thinking is too hard.

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With that being said, as I started, I don’t expect you to upvote this or anything I post.

“Especially after today’s hard fork.”

Thanks,
@strangerarray

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Written by Michael Paine

Please follow me, @stragerarray, to keep up to date with my other fiction, non-fiction, and other post.

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Hey y’all for more great content check out my friends:

(All robot images from steemd.com)

@stellabelle	@ericvancewalton	@cristi	@micheletrainer	@mctiller
@lukeofkondor	@soulsistashakti	@mindover	@mars-eve	@patrick-g
@kaylinart	@romanskv	@the-alien	@razvanelulmarin	@strangerarray
@lat-nayar	@ann-hoy	@future24	@julia26