Wow, that's a bummer...I just powered up to 2k SP for the first time, after sitting on 300 SP most of the time.
What exactly is the REASON for these changes?
As I see it, the rewards are already super low (or maybe that's my subjective bias), and now they will be cut in half for EVERYONE equally?
Why are there taxation models for different salary classes in real-life, and here every stake is handled evenly?
Now I can see why everyone is selling their STEEM, and me the idiot bought it just yesterday :D
There's a multitude of reasoning or rather "speculations" on the impact this hardfork is supposed to make.
From what I understand the gist of the EIP is aimed at making the staking of steem-power and actively curation with it more attractive while also nudging "abusive" voting-behavior to concentrate on single pieces of content for the best efficiency rather than splitting it over many low rewarded content pieces that will easily go unnoticed. Which is where the "free-downvotes" would come into play?!
I don't think we can compare the reward-pool mechanism with the model of taxation at all, but I certainly feel a bit hit over the head from up above by these changes, too.
How all these speculations play out eventually remains to be seen. This blockchain idea and steem even more so is one big social experiment after all.
We're in for an exciting ride. At least drama will keep things entertaining ;)