Okay so a few things
When it gets down to .05 inflation, only those with actually high HP will have meaningful upvotes.
This isn't true necessarily, it depends on what you think are meaningful votes. When hive was worth $3, even a dolphin was giving away several $ upvotes, but the amount in HP remained the same as when hive was $0.2 due to their stake and pull on inflation.
the logic is that those larger stake holders will be less likely to vote for those who sold their stake and earnings of the years??
This may be true, I've been reading quite some posts lately of people changing their voting behavior to reward those more who stay vested, it's a social media platform and proof of brain token so it's not outlandish to expect people to cast judgement and want to protect their stake in different ways, not everyone may do so, I for instance am in the boat that "oh well they'll have to face their own regret when the markets turn" so I don't look too much at that personally.
As for it affecting onboarding I wouldn't say it does, new users should get the chance to become larger stakeholders much like the people with the mindset above once were but grew over the years and myself included. However if they constantly sell all stake then it's only natural to assume that stakeholders may favor newer users to give them the same chance. There's many curation projects who for instance focus on newcomers to help retention but after some time they hope others will carry the job of further curating them for retention so they can focus on new users.
With more distributed stake it means that even those new users who stayed vested can help further distribute stake, even though at these prices it is hard to imagine, a thousand users with 1000 HP voting on a single post has the same outcome as one whale with 1m hp, we've just never gotten to those activities where a lot of small users are active in distributing votes.
I should be putting out more low quality content to take advantage of current inflation rewards.
I didn't necessarily mean you should change your behavior, as I mentioned your activities have consequences, if you're getting support now either from auto or manual votes maybe it's cause of the way you've been posting and if you change that then this may change too, who knows.
It's best to keep doing you in terms of content and activity, I'm merely stating in this post that if Hive magically were to rise tomorrow and it'd bring in thousands of new active users or we somehow fixed onboarding and someone invited in thousands of active users all of a sudden, then the way voting works would over time mean that the regular folks wouldn't get as much support in terms of HP earnings from posts as they may do now when competition for it is low. Even though it probably isn't as low as last bear market in terms of hive price.
There's only a set amount of hivepower that goes out daily, what you may earn in hbd can scale to thousands if the price is higher, some authors only care about that as they never hold any stake, they just come back when prices are higher to get hbd from their usual voters and leave again when hive prices are lower since they're not interested in the long term speculation of hive, just the short term hbd rewards. My point is that eventually when they come back it may be the last time that hive stays low and they may find themselves having to compete for the rewardspool vs 10x more active users, they're not going to be able to earn the same stake and votes they once did if their supporters have forgotten about them or simply choose to do the "human thing" and ignore them because they're just there for the pump.
I appreciate your thorough response @acidyo
I feel nudged closer to comprehension.
In general i treat my time here on HIVE much the way i treat my life in the real world. I know there are things and reasons for why the world is the way it is, i just dont put much effort into trying to figure it out. I try to just find my joy in this life and let the world do its thing while i try to be the best me i can be within it.
So yes, i was not saying i would change my behavior based on the info of your post. More just processing my interpretation of what you were saying. Though it all feels above my pay grade really 😉
so for now ill just go back to making my own little posts for my own little reasons and leave the bigger HIVE picture to the magicians that write the code.