For those who are not old enough to remember this mess, New Coke was a genius idea by some strung out knucklehead at the Coca-Cola company in the 1980s. They decided to radically alter the formula for Coke, after more than 90 years. Coke, if memory serves me, was the best selling soft drink at that time although it had been losing market share.

New Coke was introduced and the old formula scrapped. Based upon taste tests, people indicated they preferred the sweeter taste of Pepsi. The taste tests were wrong.

The new formula bombed severely. It was so bad that the original formula was brought back within 3 months. Renamed "Coca-Cola Classic", it still is in the same form more than 30 years later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Coke

So why do I bring this up?

It appears the Witnesses are going to accept a proposal from Steemit Inc. regarding Hard Fork 21. This is going to radically alter the basis of how Steem operates.

To start, I have one question for all Witnesses: When has Steemit Inc ever shown itself to have the community's best interest at heart?

I will grant the organization was better the last 6 months but after the previous 3 years, is it wise to trust them? I do not believe it is at this point.

This proposal went from idea to Hard Fork in a very quick period of time. Is this also wise?

Here is something that was said, I presume, tongue in cheek but it does drive home the point.

Do you all remember Hard Fork 20? It was a complete goat f*ck. Witnesses did NOT do their job ensuring that the system was protected. All ability to post was wiped out for most accounts. The sudden shift to Resource Credits left a lot of smaller accounts without the ability to do anything even after things were restored over a week later.

Aren't the Witnesses suppose to be looking out for the community?

So now we are suppose to trust that something goes from an idea to Hard Fork in about a month is well vetted?

@timcliff wrote up a post about the Hard Fork and his thoughts on it. It is a worthwhile read before proceeding further to get an idea of what changes are taking place.

https://www.steempeak.com/hf21/@timcliff/hardfork-21-steem-proposal-system-sps-economic-improvement-proposal-eip

I want to thank Tim for writing that and for explaining the changes that are on the table.. What I am posting here is nothing against him personally. I used him as an example although he is far from unique in this.

Unfortunately, his post is full of "I do not knows" and "we are not sures". This is another major red flag to me. How can we be considering implementing something so drastic and fundamentally altering on a "we have no idea if it will work but we are bound to just try something"?

Here is what the goal is:

It means more money going into the hands of users who are contributing to the value of Steem, and less money going into the hands of the users who are just here to leach. Hopefully, this leads to more value being generated - which can potentially lead to a higher STEEM price.

Leaving the "hopefully" aside, how on earth does anyone think that this will end up in the hands of people contributing? Are we to believe the smaller accounts will be better off than they are today?

Look at the math that @preparedwombat did.

Even if the math is not exact since the voting rewards have variables such as when they took place, the point is there. The drop in author payout is even bigger since the funding of proposals that is being also taken out of the reward pool.

So now we are going to see the smaller accounts' payout affected not only by a reduced reward pool (which is fine, we should fund worker proposals in some manner because they can provide a great deal of value) but we are also taking the measly amount they get and cutting it down significantly.

How are they suppose to make it up? By curating themselves? What is the curation when a vote is worth .002?

So what is the goal here? Is it for smaller accounts to make even less money while larger ones (including bid bots) take home bigger chunks?

Surely we are not going to lean on that manual curation idea. Does anyone think the larger accounts are going to upvote a couple hundred minnows and planktons a week?

Not to pick on Tim but let us look at his voting record over the past two weeks.

Is this suddenly going to change? Are these Orcas and Whales suddenly going to start to spread the upvotes around a lot more to compensate for the loss in author rewards that these smaller accounts are experiencing?

The answer is no simply because it is impossible. There is no way that any of these people can manually curate hundreds of accounts a day, every day. There is not enough hours unless one is curating full time. And even then, how do you find the smaller accounts? The ability to find content on this blockchain sucks (perhaps that is something that should be addressed first) so how is Mr. Whale going to find Ms. Quality Content Newbie?

So, once again, what is the goal? Is it to have a thriving ecosystem with smaller accounts coming on and beginning their journey? Or is it to enrich the few who has a lot of SP who can take a larger chunk by curating.

Another issue I have is the narrative that this will stop the bid bots. How is that even a logical outcome? The amount they are receiving is going to increase. Their curation just jumped. And with less of a payout to authors, there is even more (not less) incentive to use them to get some attention. They can do the math and adjust their algorithm accordingly.

I can tell you bid bot owners are some pretty smart people and they are not going to just allow the rug to be pulled out from under them. Mark my words, this will be a windfall.

What I do know though, is we need some major changes to the system in order to even have a chance of getting there.

Okay how about this, every Orca and Whale, for the next 6 months, manually curate 50 accounts a day with under 1,000 SP. Do it without changing the system and giving the larger percentage of the rewards to the accounts who need it most. That would radically change the system.

Not going to happen? So why should we believe that the larger accounts will do it when the getting a bigger piece of the pie?

How about dealing with the on-boarding issue? As mentioned, perhaps a better way to search out content would be more productive?

Maybe use SMTs to alter the compensation people receive? Not done yet. How about waiting for them to come into being before making base changes?

There are a lot of things that can be addressed which will have more certain impact.

To me, this feels like the Witnesses are throwing toilet paper against the wall in hopes that something sticks.

Not exactly what I want to see from the Witnesses.

I can only hope we are not having a New Coke moment.

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