I have mostly been a fan of the recent HF changes because they have created massive demand for owning Steem Power, something that has been lacking on here for some time now.

However, there are certainly some major drawbacks to the changes as well, which I won't really go into detail here but I am sure you can all guess what those might be.

In my opinion there are 3 things that could/should be changed within the "rules" of Steemit/Steem that would make this place not only run better, but potentially thrive.

Without further adu, here they are:

1. Limit Self upvotes to 3 per day (or any number between 1 and 5).

There has been a huge debate ever since the most recent changes as to whether self voting should be allowed or not. I personally don't even think that should be a debate, it most certainly should be allowed as it gives great incentive to increasing your own Steem Power on the platform. 

However, there must be a limit to it. If every user on here all of the sudden decided it would be in their best interest to only upvote their own comments and posts every day and not vote for any one else, this place would go down the drain in a hurry. To be honest, the current setup incentivizes people to do just that, so we need to make some tweaks. 

Limiting self upvotes would limit the amount of spam posts on here and it would limit the number of comment self votes that many on here believe contribute next to nothing besides lining the voter's pockets. 

2. Not allow users to vote on the same author on back to back days, must have 48 hours between upvotes.

(This is done to help discourage sock puppet accounts)

Admittedly, this is by far the most controversial. However, it piggy backs off of change number 1. If we just limit self votes without also doing this, then people will be incentivized to created multiple accounts and use all their voting power each day only to vote on all their different sock puppet accounts. 

Not allowing users to vote on the same author more than once in a 2 day period will help spread votes around to more users. This is not my ideal change, but to me it is a necessary change to help curb the demand for sock puppet accounts.

In my opinion the first change is mostly useless if you don't also do a change like this one, no matter how controversial it seems at first. 

3. Change curation rewards to 40%, so that the new split would be 60% to the author and 40% to the curators.

This one will help incentivize people to actually go out and vote for other people. The first 2 changes were targeted at preventing abuse, but ideally if we incentivize the right things, the abuses will become less and less.

The current curation rewards are too small in my opinion to properly incentivize most people to go out and spend the time using their voting power on other users.

Final thoughts:

Each change by itself probably won't do enough to change the behaviors of users on here, but when you combine all 3 of these major changes I think you could really see this place transform, spread it's wings, and start to take off.

Let me know your thoughts in the comment section below. 

Follow me: @jrcornel