There are a lot of discussions on steemit at the moment about the number of views being down on posts across the board and a reduction in the amount of up votes. As you can imagine this is causing problems and there are a few people complaining about this and I’ve even seen comments of people saying it has made them move back to Facebook a little bit.
This post is here to tell you that it’s early days and to stay strong.
Yes HF19 was a crazy day when it happened and everybody had a huge increase in upvotes and will be getting much higher payouts over the next week. This all seems positive but there was also something that happened alongside of the payout. Everybody’s voting power tanked as it was exchausted from the previous heavy use.
Voting Power has changed
Before HF19, people could vote at 100% 40x a day with no repercution. After 40x you would then see your voting power decline (For those that do not know you can check your voting power on steemd.com/@yourusername).
After HF19 this reduced that number down to 10x a day and adjusted the reward split between whales and minnows. If you think about what this did, it effectively changed the rules in one big hit and it meant that people who had been voting heavily like they always have done has now just seen a huge drop in voting power. Add this to the fact that people saw the upvote rewards and started going crazy just after the HF19 roll out and you suddenly have thousands of Steemit users with barely any voting power left.
This caused an epic hangover
What resulted was a ton of people check their voting power, seeing there was barely any left, freaking out about it and then no longer voting. I have no direct data or prove but I think this will be a large factor on why we have seen a huge reduction in upvotes.
But what about the views?
I have just explained why there may be a reduction in upvotes, but what about views? Well, unfortunately this may well be proving that people comment and upvote a lot mainly so that they can get the curation rewards benefits. Remove a person’s voting power and they will stop engaging as much overall.
Hangovers never last
Like any hangover, it will go away. It may be a pain, it may make people not want to do anything on Steemit for a few days but overtime peoples voting power will restore and people will start to upvote as normal again with a few adjustments.
People will start to use the slider
I think this has taught a lot of people not to 100% vote everything. I think we will see people using the slider a lot more and voting an amount based on what they think.
In Summary
All I wanted to say in this post is do not worry. Steemit will seem like it has less views over the next few days but trust me, everything will return and we will all be much better because of it.
If you enjoyed this post, check out my others and follow me @adamm
I am part of the promo-uk initiative support Steemit growth in the UK. Find out if you can help.
Agreed. I saw my voting power dip under 25 percent the day of the fork because I was voting quite often pre-fork. There is a collective "days of resting" period going on for many Steemit users. Once more members start to realize how the voting power now works, we'll see votes coming back in.
From what I've seen already, I have to scale down my voting percentage or I'll never get back above 50 percent voting power. So it's been an adjustment for all of us.
You are right. In my opinion people want to keep the value of votes but to vote as much as before. Which is not possible. For me it is above all a habit to be taken. We will see
Thanks for your comment. In theory it should be possible to vote as much as before. But people will need to learn to use the vote slider. Give smaller and larger percentage votes based on how much they want to support it.
Followed. Nice little article. Short, sweet, and accurate. Nicely done.
Well said @adamin - I have been on Steemit for 6 weeks, and foresaw the impact of continuing to upvote all of my interests / followers / followees ! Initially I went crazy upvoting like a silly fool as I learned the dynamics of this platform. It paid off handsomely with nearly 300 followers, a 48 rep and near 60 in STEEM POWER influence. The hard fork caused me to immediately cut upvotes to 1 or 2 and simply re-steem a couple of glaring high profile whale posts. I have recovered to 84.59% voting power and will now wait to get my 100% back before making any further engagement. Just seems to make good sense. I do agree that the rebound will occur to make our community even stronger (and more profitable) once the above dynamic is realized and members more cautiously direct their vote power under a new frugal environment. STEEM On !
I am glad that you are here. I saw the shout out from @stephenkendal and figured I would follow you. Great post btw. I was trying to wrap my mind around the HF19 changes and the long term effects.
Thanks :) pleased you enjoyed the post.