HF21 - Why HF21 will ultimately be good for authors

tl;dr - Steem will be worth more, and better policing will keep a huge amount of spam from being rewarded and it'll go to the good authors and the hodlers on the platform.

I didn't start in favor of this

I didn't like 50:50 curation for a long time. I started on this platform with nothing. I had no steem, no bitcoin, no crypto, and really no knowledge of what I was even doing. I made my initial grounds by authoring and blogging. So, when I think of my roots I'm a content creator on Steem.

I want authors to do well. That's really important. Let me ask the authors something. How's the current system working out for you? From what I've noticed my posts don't really earn jack nor shit and the price of steem keeps falling.

There's a good possibility that everything we think to do is pissing in the wind because all alts are still getting rekted, but we're getting rekted more so than many

So, authors are about to get pretty hard on the surface of this next Hard Fork. The Steem Proposal System is going to draw 10% of total steem supply to the worker fund. That will cut author rewards. Then there's the change from 75% of the Steem going to the author down to 50% going to the author. All told at first glance the author is going to lose 40% of the reward that they have been used to getting.

I'm a top 20 witness and I've been blogging here for three years. My median reward these days on a post is $3. So, I'm not feeling like I'm losing all that much.

On the flip side we're gaining a really powerful tool in the form of the SPS. Having a supply of funds that we can allocate in bigger chunks than post by post should help us.

THe other thing that I think will be the unsung hero of this is that holding powered up Steem will be twice as valuable. Right now there's a pretty good question: I understand why you'd hold 100 steem, or why you'd hold 10 Million. I don't understand why you'd hold 1000.

Well, I personally enjoy holding Steem, but if I were suddenly getting twice as much in curation it starts to make sense to hold more Steem. It scales well too. If I have 10k Steem and then power up to 20K Steem I will get twice as much benefit.

If everyone starts having more reason to power up Steem maybe the sell pressure slows, and maybe the buy pressure increases. If people start buying because it helps them earn more then hopefully the price increases and post rewards are actually stronger.

What about bid bots?

So, right now trending is totally dominated by bid bots. I think it's a healthy thing for the ecosystem that you can purchase votes and get onto trending. But I don't think it's healthy that we're completely dominated by it and don't seem to have any really good defense against it.

So, the two things that I like about SPS for this are the down votes and the fact that curation might start to matter again.

So, lots of shit posts use bid bots. There isn't really any consequence. They upvote. No down votes come. And... that's the end. Bid bots make money and the voter makes money.

Now comes down votes. The author shit posts. The user base doesn't allow it to earn by tossing down votes, and the bid bot delegators get hurt because they are losing a lot in curation. The delegators themselves start to have a vested interest in bid bot owners being careful about what content is allowed to be voted so that they protect their investment.

I think it'll make good bid bots profitable and anything goes bid bots unprofitable.

A part of good bid botting will be using down votes from the bid bots. It's bit like asking the police to police themselves. There's certainly some possibility of abuse here too, but in general if the bid bot owners use smart downvotes to take down shitty content then they can provide a higher return to their investors. Bots that do this I think will be rewarded with delegations. Those that wont' I think will lose it.

So, across the board I'm hopeful that flagging/downvoting can be used to level rewards, increased curator amounts will make for more reasons to hold Steem which should increase price, and bid bot behavior will hopefully change too.

Those are my thoughts, but Steem is the land of unintended consequences. We'll see how it actually lands, but I don't think the doom and gloomers are right.

New Steem right over that ridge.