DISCLAIMER: i could be wrong about some claims (it's extremely hard to find and read all changes that ever happened to the STEEM blockchain or steemit.com).

After not using SteemIt for about 10 months i wanted to see what has changed. It turns out a lot has changed! I will start with looking at how many of the 10 big concerns i had when i left are solved, so after doing about a full day of research here we go:

1. Everyone is desperate for whale attention

It still seems to be the case that posts that get large boosts from whales have a very high probability to make a lot of money compared to potential quality content that gets no whale attention. It is extremely problematic if you let 1 rich person be more influential than a few or even hundreds of "poor" people. I'm still way more for REWARDING people that actually support the network (quality content creators and quality curators) with STEEM POWER and not allow people to BUY it, they haven't earned anything. I'm not entirely against the idea to allow people to buy STEEM POWER though, i just think the current algorithms are way, way, way too generous to rich people. I prefer a more logarithmic approach where someone with 10 times the STEEM POWER only has twice the power.

2. Voting power algorithm

In the hard fork 0.19 proposal you could potentially vote 2% of your remaining voting power per vote, this would mean that you can vote 34 times and still only spend 50% of your total voting power. This is still not drastic enough! I still stand by my last proposal:

3. Static voting weight

Now you will get a voting slider when you have 500 STEEM POWER or more. You can then choose how much weight goes into the vote. 100% means you vote with 2% of your voting power (if hard fork 0.19 is accepted).

4. Down-voting is disadvantageous

Nothing seems to have changed, every action still uses voting power and there still aren't 2 different reward pools (separate upvote and downvote pools) where your rewards are based on the % of votes in the pool you voted (which means that if the post has 80% likes and 20% dislikes at the moment of first payout, you earn 80% of the reward pool). Currently if you flag something you don't even receive curator rewards for your action to keep the network clean!

5. Reputation system

There don't seem to be any changes to the algorithm so the same problem still exists i assume: reputation is almost exclusively based on how much money you made. Also still almost nobody is using the flag feature since it's disadvantageous to the flagger.

6. Reverse auction

There don't seem to be any changes to this system either so you still can't vote whenever you want (which can easily be resolved).

7. Up-voters receive rewards from their own vote

I don't think this has been fixed either. If you upvote your own post you shouldn't receive that reward, it should always go to the curators. Voting on your own post should be identical to curator votes (other people don't receive author rewards for curating either).

8. Payout periods

The payout periods have changed to at least one period of 7 days. Does the second 30 day period still exist? It seems like you can never get paid again after that? I am still for payouts every 24 hours, forever. Imagine how this would work if Youtube only paid ad revenue for the first few days of your upload. It's insanity! If you want SteemIt to get a good reputation you shouldn't promote pump and dump culture, Ponzi schemes or 1 hit wonders.

9. Trending algorithm

Nothing seems to have changed. Still only extremely high earning posts are trending and not one post with 100's of likes that is under $10! Trending should exclusively be based on how many people voted on something during a time period, not how much the post has earned. If a post is earning a lot it's almost exclusively because 1 or more whales voted on it and people that don't understand the curator reward algorithm whatsoever just vote on it because of the fear of missing out (FOMO).

After further research it looks like "hot" should be renamed to "trending" and "trending" should be renamed to "highest earning".

10. Editing algorithm

I think you can still edit your post constantly and keep your post hot?

Positive changes:

• Daniel Larimer left the STEEM team (some people seemed to have problems with him, i personally don't)
• Changed the total POWER DOWN time from 104 weeks to 13 weeks!
• STEEM DOLLAR conversion takes 3.5 days in stead of 7
• Inflation is 9.5% APR and lowering by roughly 0.5% untill it's 0.95% inflation APR
• If HF19 is accepted you can assign 2% (in stead of 0.5%) of your total voting power per vote (for example after 34 votes @ full power you still have 50% of your voting power)
• First payout changed from 1 day to 7 days (where the last 12 hours only allows flagging?)
• Content creators can now decide between no payout, 50/50 payout or 100% STEEM POWER payout
• Posts can't be deleted anymore after the first payout (7 days)
• FAQ/Wiki added (FAQ hard to find though, since it's in the weird extra menu in the top right of steemit.com)
• STEEM 2017 roadmap (with promising features) is added
• Steemit.com post viewcount is added
• Resteeming is added
• Notifications are added
• Post promotion is added
• STEEM DOLLAR stability is added, this means that less STEEM DOLLARS are printed and rewarded (you can receive rewards in STEEM sometimes in addition to STEEM DOLLARS)
• You can now edit posts until the second payout as well
• You can now lock up STEEM & STEEM DOLLARS for 3 days as an extra measure of security against account breach
• Profile picture and information
• Current earnings in wallet page
• NSFW tag, warnings and account settings
• At least 1 alternative (Windows) client next to steemit.com
• Most of the money in the STEEM network seems to be owned by the exchanges now, in stead of the creators (the creators still have an enormous amount of STEEM POWER though)

Things that still haven't changed:

• Still way too much low quality content in many forms
• It's still wayyyyy too confusing to have 4 keys, to withdraw money if you don't understand cryptocurrencies and so on
• Steemit tag still extremely dominant
• Spam
• Meaningless bots
• The top 10% of users own 99% of the money!
• Rich individuals and/or organisations can still invest to dominate the network and decide what needs to be popular and what needs to be less popular (a form of censorship)

Conclusion:

Only 1 out of my 10 fundamental concerns has been resolved! This doesn't look promising for the direction of SteemIt in the future. It looks like the creators don't recognize these fundamental problems for whatever reason. I am excited about some of the changes that happened in the past 10 months, don't get me wrong, but those unfortunately don't matter much until most of these 10 fundamental problems are fixed.

If you agree with me that most of these 10 fundamental problems have to be largely resolved before SteemIt can truly thrive with billions of users, the best thing you can do is resteem this post, promote this post, comment on this post, spread this content, write your own opinion on the matter or let the developers know.

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