These changes are perfect if you're a virgin living in your moms basement and only have 4 friends. In that case I can see why you might want to only start topics with them in between CoD or WoW sessions.
Otherwise you are just asking everyone to take a financial penalty for being social on a social network.
If you don't like to read people's posts and think about what they are saying right now, you already have the power to ignore them, even downvote and flag them. Or just don't go to places you know they frequent.
Unfortunately with this change, in the future many people will ration their posting activity to only what will make the most money and use facebook, Reddit, twitter & slashdot for actual social commentary.
So expect a flood of quality posts like...
+1 ****** Excellent post! Upvoted you!
Because those will be the most lucrative and in the presence of penalties, the only rational choice is to ration posts to the ones that will make the most money.
So the whole site will become bots, in introduceyourself posting 4x daily the moment any whales surface to upvote the noob. Got it?
This is the beginning of the bot wars.
https://steemit.com/steemit/@williambanks/bot-warz-a-hybrid-approach