I'm optimistic, and understand why these changes were made. My only concern is that now that minnows have orders of magnitude increase in influence, they need to be aware about how the curation rewards system works. Since my posts on curation rewards, I've chat with dozens of newbies both here and chat, and it seems painfully obvious most would simply pile on the votes for trending posts thinking that's where the rewards are.
I'd consider leaving comments and downvotes on overrewarded posts urging minnows to curate responsibly after HF19. I know that'll be extremely unpopular, and I'm happy to stop blogging for a bit as this will make me vulnerable to flags en masse. But I believe it is crucial that if the power were given to the community, they be aware about the system and learn to curate responsibly. My posts don't get much attention, I'd be grateful if more influencers like yourself get the message across. :)
With Subcommunities, discoverability will increase a great deal, so I'm not worried about posts being lost like they are now.
PS: Whales have to learn to delegate responsibly as well, and not just their friends.
PPS: I'd like to see a dynamic voting target that scales with activity. Making 10 votes will be no good when the community has a million posts.
I like your "PPS" idea to set voting targets based on activity. I read a lot of posts and leave a lot of comments, as well as votes. And I vote at my maximum power for all those posts and comments. I guess I'll have to set my vote power to some percentage to have the same impact after HF19.
You make a good point, too, about minnows upvoting trending posts, especially since we have so many new folks coming on board. If the subcommunities come pretty soon, it might be all right. But until then, oh boy, we may be in for some surprises.
One of the mistakes newbies make is voting on everything like they're on FaceBook. I speak from my own experience here. The tendency is to start off upvote click happy, until you really start reading up and understanding how SteemIt differs from other social media sites. It takes a while to get the brain to shift into being upvote selective, especially when you bounce off here and back over to one of the other sites.
That's true. But then when people get the vote power slider, many go the other way and just put 1% of their vote power on everything -- and have almost no effect again. But that's part of what makes Steemit interesting. There's so much going on, it's like a whole ecosystem.
That is interesting. I haven't reached a level where the vote slider has appeared, so I hadn't given any thought to that side of the equation.
Is there any benefit to the voter in reducing the vote power like that?
meep
YES! I got a "meep."
Why does that make me happy?
meep
It's just that it lowers the rate of using up your voting power. That means you can spread more around to more posts or comments. But each vote is then worth less. Some folks go crazy and set all their votes to 1%. But that means they would have to vote 400 times a day to use all their vote power. And they don't. So they just leave unused voting power in the payout pool, rather than distributing it around.
Ah. Got ya.
If you want to collaborate on a 'newbie friendly' guide to curation, I can work on getting it up on the Quick Start Guide. I agree that user education on what to do vs. what not to do would go a long way.
Sure, though I don't know how much we need to load that Welcome page? I'd be happy to collaborate, either way.
There is a section near the bottom with helpful posts from users. We can add it there (assuming the Steemit dev team approves). If you want to send me a draft over steemit.chat I'll review and provide feedback/edits. I think it would be a great post!