Hard fork is a bust. Seriously. It’s had almost no impact, because the people it was designed to help are still engaging in the same behavior. Let me ask you, how many upvotes did you hand out today? I know I’m guilty. See, if the dolphins and minnows don’t exercise their full voting rights, then no amount of balancing the voting power changes anything.
Look around, the people who were getting hundreds of votes before, mostly still are. This means the rewards are still being divided along similar lines, if slightly more equally. In order for us to cause a seismic shift away from the things that currently get all of the rewards, we are going to need to change our voting mindset.
Every day, the prize pool is made up of a specific percentage of new steem. It is essentially the same amount each day. So, fewer votes, means each vote is weighted heavier than it would otherwise be and we’ve seen this before. Last year when there was talk of losing voting power, people began to conserve. They simply stopped voting. The effect at that time, was to stack the deck even more in favor of those Whales that did vote! And, I think it’s happening again.
Why do I think this? Well, take a look at my votes. Since I started active posting again, my following has grown by 50%. But, the number of votes I’m getting has not noticeably increased. In fact, since the hard fork, my votes, if anything, have dropped on average. So, what’s going on? I think that people are unnecessarily concerned about their voting power, to the point they are not spending the ten full-power votes they have in each 24 hour period. Remember, even beyond this your votes simply carry less payout, you are not limited.
If every active user were to engage in the process to the full extent of their full voting power, that would mean 300 votes per account. If this was happening, my 50% increase in following would create a rise in vote numbers. It hasn’t.
In addition to the suspected self limiting of votes, I’ve noticed something else.
Many of the accounts that have been at the top of the trending posts lists recently are newly successful accounts. Not only did that not have much success before the hard fork, they didn’t have hardly any votes. Now, they are consistently getting hundreds of votes, where fewer than a couple dozen were happening before. I’m not sure what this is about.
Looking further, however, in each case, I’ve noticed one of two things. Either steem was sent to these accounts from other places (could be from an exchange accounts, the owners having bought into steem) or, they working with delegated steem power from whales. While I understand that the rules allow for this behavior, it’s frustrating.
I care, because, consistently, the content being rewarded is very narrow in topic, outside of the norm for content that has been historically upvoted, and not really adding much in value to the site. I’d mention specific accounts, but after calling out a certain someone, I intend to avoid that type of confrontation unless I find it necessary.
So, what am I saying? I think we (the smaller account, and medium sized account holders) need to vote more. I think it’s important. The trends we set now may continue for the life of this platform. Right now, the rewards are still being concentrated in a few posts. That was supposed to end. I also think we need to stop following the trends, follow topics we find valuable, and only vote for content we truly feel deserves high reward.
Voting is not enough. Adding comments and resteeming, along with an upvote, however, can make a difference. Please consider doing all of the above on at least 10 posts a day to help make hardfork 19 work the way it’s supposed to. Otherwise, we are in for a continued string of “successful” authors, while the rest of us get much improved, but substantially lower rewards.