I Hate To Admit It, But I Was Wrong About HF 20

I wrote a post in which I accused the people of Steemit Inc of being short-sighted and wrong with their approach to curation and the sending of money from our posts to the pool to be re-distributed! To sum it up, I was rather harsh on them (as @beeyou said at the time).

I made the point that we were just sending our money to the pool to be taken by the big players that game the system. While my intentions were proper (I did think it was really wrong), my analysis was flawed. I had received several attempts to reach out to me from Steem witnesses (and friends) @abh12345, @paulag, and @danielsaori; and all of them felt that the HF 20 wasn't a bad thing and that I was looking at it wrong. While I noted their opinions, and certainly respected their views, I was still not convinced.

Then I received a discord message from @carlgnash. He kept at it with me until I saw the light. I applaud his patience as he genuinely wanted me to understand how this was going to work. In the end, he did convince me. And that is something I, like most people, don't like to admit. I was wrong.

How HF 20 Will Work And Why I Now Support It

Brief Introduction

Part of the post payout will change under HF 20. The part that will change will have to do with the portion of curation that goes to the author. To simplify this, think of it as this way: A post has 75% that is called a "Author reward" and 25% that is called a "Curator reward".

The Author ALWAYS got his/her 75% and that will stay exactly the same under HF20. No one will lose any of that 75% and none of that will go to the "pool".

The Author SOMETIMES received some of the 25% of the Curation depending on when the votes were cast. The more there were early votes, the more % that went to the author (in addition to his 75% payout on the post). This is the part that will change under HF 20.

The Curators that voted early were in effect handing money from the post over to the Author. While this seems like a good thing, in reality if the so called "curators" were really tied to the Author (either through their own ALT accounts or bid-bots), then what was happening is that these weren't really curators upvoting the post because it was good. Instead these were just votes that were casts by the authors to scheme the way the system was designed. And HF 20 will alter this behavior dramatically.

The New Way

According to @carlgnash, now what will happen is the curators will still get paid their part of curation. But what will happen is the part of the early vote that was already foresaken by the curator (and going to the Author) will now go to the pool instead. So the Author will be the only one that loses from these early votes (but remember, the Author was getting these USUALLY because they had the money to upvote themselves). The other curators will still get paid based on where they fit on the time/vote-value scale, and that scale will stay pretty much the same (with minor alterations due to the limit going from 30 min to 15 min). So normal curators will still earn, and now they won't have to compete against the Author giving himself a raise in % by self-voting or using ALTS/Bid-bot Early Votes.

What This Means

The smaller steemians by and large essentially receive about 75% of their vote as it already stands. So the effect on them won't be much of a change, other than the pool for payout should actually now be increasing due to lack of early votes taking from the pool. In fact it could be argued that the small ones might even get a bump, as people search again for posts that might rise due to high quality.

The larger steemians and ones that use bid-bots to vote early (less than 5 min) will be hurt the most. They simply won't be able to do that anymore, and thus not get 90 to 95% of their posts paid to them while the small guys get 75%. In effect, the ones with money will actually lose their edge (in this respect).

I also think this will have an impact on the bot-owners too. They will have a decrease in demand as many people only used the bots to get this early vote advantage. Once HF20 comes into play, this will put a lot of pressure on the bot owners and they will have to cut back on their payouts for SP leases or they will suffer horribly on any downswings in price of steem.

One other loser (in my opinion) will be the delegators of their SP. As mentioned above, the demand for votes will be hurt by this move and force them to accept a lower rate of return. While this might sound like a bad thing, to those that have been paying a 25% to 30% rate of return to lease steem it will certainly be a positive thing. The investors that don't participate in day to day activities, should see a reduction in the interest they receive in passive form as a result of this change.

A Complete 180

Net net. I actually have done a 180 degree turn. I have gone from hating it and even thinking it is one more sign of tone-deafness by @ned and the people at Steemit Inc, to one that might just make a difference at the margin. While it will no means fix the lopsidedness of the distribution of Steem within the community, it will certainly help to give the small fish a chance to play on a more even field. It is a great step forward by the people that devised it and supported it, and I am happy to admit that I made a mistake when I denounced it a week ago!

Thank you to @carlgnash (a @curie community representative, direct follow curator and reviewer from @curie and the co-founder of @c-squared) for being patient enough to go back and forth with me to help me understand this topic.

I also want to thank the Steem Witness team of @steemcommunity @abh12345 and @paulag along with Steem Witness @danielsaori who all 3 separately spent time trying to give me some wisdom and understanding. I'm hard headed, but finally had my eyes open enough to see the light!

My "highly recommended" witness votes will now be added to my posts. I hope you add them as your witness and to your posts too!

@steemcommunity
@danielsaori
@yabapmatt
@steemgigs
@jackmiller
@noblewitness
@comedyopenmic
@curie
@qurator
@swelker101
@ats-witness

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