This post & comments took me a good part of my morning coffee readings. Nice, informative, actual. Big thanks @timcliff. I feel that in general HF19 was a big step forward in the right direction. x4 voting power increase to me is not worth even talking about. As long as I can select 5%, 1%, (or even a 0.01% here on esteem app) of my voting power , where really the problem is for anyone?
What yet concerns me most is the BOTS. The use, misuse, and abuse brought by all kinds of bots. These community "participants" upvote, follow, unfollow, comment, possibly even downvote/flaging here on the network. Which we call a social network. But do them read? Or see picture? or watch video? What purpose these bots serve, except grow grow grow faster, more more more money, and quick? I feel this area of bot's usage remains yet to be more regulated, changed, improved. Agree? Or I misunderstand something?
Bots are not humans. I am here to interact with humans. Not dumb machines.
Bots in of themselves aren't necessarily bad. As the platform continues to scale to more users, a lot of bots (like cheetah) perform actions that humans would not be able to do on every post. There are still humans to interact with, but the bots serve their purpose too. IMO, there are good bots and bad bots (subjective opinion). The good bots are adding value to the community and improving the platform. The bad bots are serving selfish ends at the expense of the community. (There are good humans and bad humans here too..)
Although I feel that I should have joined Steemit earlier, I also feel that joining Steem after the hard fork 19 is not as bad. I get more power with my votes now compared with what people use to get before this fork was released.
Newbies get the same power as an expert, and users can always buy more Steem Power which will give you better results.