Have you ever noticed how the same authors used to dominate the frontpage day after day. This was mostly due to the whales and their bots featuring the same people over and over. Soon, a bunch of dolphines joined the party with their bots, upvoting the authors that whales usually upvote, and thus cashing in on nice curation rewards.

You could see it very clearly. Suppose a featured author posted something new at 4AM Saturday. 14 minutes later his post would have $1.25 in rewards. A minute after that, his post would suddenly jump to $1,293 after receiving a dump of whale bot love. And thus same people would earn thousands of dollars, day after day, for posting anything at anytime (anyone remember the imposter @dashpaymag).

The rest of Steemit got 2 cents.

Until today.

Change

I have noticed a very sudden shift in whale voting behavior.

A few major indicators are:

• a reduction in average top earner payouts (frontpage)
• a massive cleanup of author lists from whale upvote bots
• whales are now A LOT more active in upvoting new authors

Exciting times ahead

Our whale friends won't make as much money as they used to. Curating many small posts is not as profitable as betting on a couple dozen sure winners.

Our top authors aren't going to make as much money as they used to. Guaranteed thousands of dollars per post are gone.

New authors are going to see an instant reward for their good work. It used to be that the authors would make $0 for many of their posts, until eventually they got a winner. With this new distribution of rewards, authors will be able to receive meaningful rewards that provide encouragement and a feedback signal. It is much easier to see you've gotten better if your reward progression is $0.15, $3.5, $16, $128, $333, than if you make $0.02 on 20 posts and than one hits a $1,000. This will allow you to experiment and improve much faster.

And finally, we are breaking into new topics. This is an opportunity for all of us to start something new, something great.

What are you waiting for?

This is your opportunity

Don't blow it up.

Do not blog about Steemit

Steemit is great because X, and I love Steemit, and I bought $20 worth of Facebook ads now give me $2,000 in rewards - style posts are unlikely to get much attention in the future.

Unless you have something useful to contribute, such as a powerful new idea, new tool, design, documentation etc, I would suggest to pick something else to talk about.

Be an ice-breaker - start a new topic

We have 45,000 members, and I'b be damned if all of us are just versed in 3 skills:

• talking about steemit
• introducing ourselves
• taking pictures for #art

There are so many other things to talk about. I am personally interested in trading, investing, books (non-fiction), technology, food, nature and music.

What are you into?

Look at all of your interests. Than pick a niche - something that you're profoundly in love it. Something very unique to you, something that makes you-you.

Delight us.

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