As a frequent voter on Steemit I can tell you reducing vote target to 5/day is a terrible proposal. Some people spend more than 20 minutes a day enjoying this site, and voting shouldn't be catered to just the people who vote once in a while. That's catering inversely to user-engagement, or if you'll accept a new concept: time-stake.
It will also dramatically increase the cognitive load on voting decision, something the 40/day target fixed very well. Maybe you never experienced it, but when each vote used 5% of voting power, it was becoming a pain in the ass to decide what to vote for even with much less content that there is on Steemit today.
Edit: Another thing I thought about while upvoting comments that question this change in this post. Comment voting will be hurt as well. I frequently upvote quality comments but would have to cease if votes were targeted at just 5 per day. How ridiculous is that?
Again, this is penalizing people who are actually engaged on Steemit. I shouldn't have to explain what engagement is worth to a website.
Excellent point about cognative load. Each vote must be relatively unimportant and 1/5 of a day's allocated voting power too much. I intuitively understood this in disliking one aspect of the proposal but I hadn't yet put it into those terms.
Specifically, I current vote on comments at 1%, which at 1/2000th or so of a day's voting power was too low to matter, even with a lot of comment votes. I put zero thought into it beyond liking the comment. The 1% votes are enough to award 30-40c and start to build a payout on the comment. With this proposal I will have to think very carefully because I don't want those comment votes (which are entirely altruistic/social) to burn too much of my valuable voting power.
Thank you for the insight.
very true, i like the cognitive load argument.
It seems like these changes and many others are trying so hard to stifle bots they stifle activity. I though this would change when falling active users is widely see as the biggest problem on site. We'll see how long it takes to fix. I think we need the synereo competition to focus the mind.