HF21 is coming whether you like it or not so you had better be prepared. There are a few changes that will impact how everyone who wants a decent return on their investment operates so let's look into it. The most notable changes will be the free 2.5 downvotes per day, the 25-75% curator/author rewards changing to a 50-50 split and the convergent linear rewards curve. Collectively these changes are known as the EIP or Economic Improvement Proposal.
Free Downvotes
This is a great idea because due to the cost, not enough people were regulating the content on Steem. I see people upvoting their own comments, posting lousy blogs and bidding them up, and doing other activities that otherwise leech Steem rewards from the community. We know that upvoting and writing nice comments is the best way to make friends on here but not everyone is nice and bad actors need to be punished. Free downvotes should lead to an improvement in quality and reduce plagiarism and spam. I'm all for it!
More Rewards for Curators
This will impact the Steem blockchain more than any other change. Curation rewards will double and author rewards are decreasing from 75% to 50%. The time one must wait for full curation rewards, going to the curator as opposed to back into the pool will be reduced from 15 minutes to 1 minute. I am not sure how a quality blog can be read in 1 minute, but most curation without a comment is automatic anyway. Whitelists will increase in importance and so will curation trails.
This change also has a desirable impact of eliminating the immediate economic incentive from purchasing upvotes
I've bought upvotes before because it is profitable. The only reason someone would purchase upvotes going forward is for marketing their content, as was the original intention. Purchasing upvotes, especially with the use of bid-bots will now attract flags, so the content you are promoting better be good. Many of these upvote buying services will die as the demand decreases. Vote exchange clubs should become more profitable as will curation communities. Relevant tags, please!
Convergent Linear Rewards Curve
This basically means that the least popular, lowest quality posts will get fewer rewards. It won't make much of a difference to quality content creators and people who already have a following as they will still get mostly linear rewards (an upvote of 1 Steem will be worth almost 1 Steem as long as there are not just a few upvotes). Rewards for decent posts will be higher due to low-quality posts not taking up as much of the pool. This change will make it more difficult at first for those to join Steem as it will take time to generate a return. Steem is much more than just blogging though and with the rise of Steem based tokens (SMTs or Steem Engine powered coins ) there will be much more onboarding. New Steem accounts should be focusing on particular communities and not trying to leech micro amounts of Steem with general posts. I am all for it!
Steem Proposal System, SPS
This will set aside Steem to reward people doing specific tasks for the blockchain. Unfortunately, the rewards will come from content creators share and not from the witness rewards pool. This system will supposedly be transparent and democratic. I hope it leads to quicker and better developments for Steem and I am definitely not opposed to this as a whole but will be carefully watching each proposal to see how we can benefit from them. I am not a developer and won't be seeking any of those rewards but there could be opportunities for influencers, marketers and other tasks accomplishers. I am very optomistic about the SPS in particular.
In Conclusion I support and Look Forward to HF21
What are your thoughts?