Your Votes Will Be More Powerful With Hard Fork 19 - And You’d Better Be Careful With Them!

“With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility” - Uncle Ben

Have you ever felt that Steemit’s voting system is unfair? It’s understandable to be sad when your vote is worth $0.01 or even less.

Trust me, I was once in that very same boat! I’ve earned every single steem in my account through hard work and diligent posting. I was far too poor to invest at the start, in fact I was pretty much at financial rock bottom when I first joined in January 2017… during the dark ages of Steem!!

It feels great to have valuable votes. Even with my current modest vote power of $0.05, I love the feeling of supporting my fellow artists.

What is changing?

Hard Fork 19 is going to make your votes more powerful in two ways:

-Voting curve will be linear, not exponential - so whales will be less powerful, and minnows more powerful.
-Your strongest votes will use 2% of your voting power, not 0.5%.

_{I’m intentionally making this post non-technical. See https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/2hfxx1-pre-release-hf19-linear-rewards for the deep details.}

The most important thing to be aware of: It used to require 40 votes to utilize your full voting power each day. Now it only takes 10 votes. That means your votes are four times more powerful than before.

How to Adjust to HF19

The right way to vote used to be: Upvote anything that looks good. Hey, you had 40 votes, why not use ‘em?

The right way to vote in the future is: Be judicious with your vote. Seek out the content that really excites you and give it your full support.

You have the power to influence Steem and help it achieve its true potential. Will you take your role seriously?

My Plan

I’m so damned happy about this update. Now I can focus my votes in a way that really supports my favorite artists & creators like never before.

I love weird art. Thomas Pynchon, Bjork, Flying Lotus, David Lynch, are a few examples of that shit that I do like. Going forward, I’m on a mission: I want to amplify support for experimental art on this platform.

In the short term, that means this: I’ll be exclusively voting for the highest quality content that relates to left-of-center artwork and insightful blogging / philosophizing.

My voting spread will be thus:

-5 Full Power Votes on Posts featuring great art (music, writing, visual, whatever)
-3 Full Power Votes on Insightful “Non-Fiction” Posts / Essays (anything philosophical and futuristic)
-2 Full Power Votes to reward great comments on my own content

I’ll probably keep auto-voting my own original posts (not comments) as well - but this is limited to once or twice a day.

In the medium and long term, I am thinking about starting a Streemian trail and eventually offering art scholarships via Steem - but that stuff will take time, and is best left for another post.

What about you? How will HF19 affect your Steem methods? And, if you have any thoughts or criticisms of my plan, please share them in the comments - I appreciate all feedback as I work to be the best Steemian I can be.

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