Steemit CEO Ned Scott said in the press release, “With this hardfork the greatest portion of the community feels the ecosystem will be changing for the better and will now be more accessible to more people. The hard fork request was initiated by the community, and once we reiterated the recommendations, we received an overwhelmingly positive response. The reason we built Steemit was to create not just a community where people could get rewarded for their time, creativity, attention and effort; but one where every user has a voice. The community has recommended improvements to the platform and we responded to help us all. We’ve always encouraged two-way dialogue with our user base and we feel that this will benefit all current and future users of Steemit.