Well written, Alex! Indeed, the number of upvotes is decreasing although the rewards are huge compared to previous months. To be honest, there might be another issue with steem price once the new payouts will happen under the new rule. Many users could decide to sell, hence steem price could drop dramatically.

I'm not very strong in technical moments, but I agree with you. It's just arithmetic ...

I think you make a very good point here, however won't removing the ability to up vote will make Steem Power less valuable?

I think we are quickly learning this. I need to stop voting for a bit to replenish. Then I will need to to think about what percentages to use.

Or our self upvotes are capped at 25%. Comments that are self upvoted capped at 5%. That will force everyone to produce quality work, network within the community, and find others' quality posts for curation and comments to supplement their income.

Removing self upvoting is like asking newbies to leave steemit. Many of my posts have only 1 vote, and that's my own, I usually have to use minnow support to help myself out. Just because a few bad eggs might try to exploit the system, does not mean that self up voting should be removed completely. I for one have never upvoted my own comment. 

I do hear that the system will stabilize after about a week, so hopefully this issue dies down as well. I'm more concerned that this new ,10 votes per day will lead to the creation of groups. People who only upvote each other, leaving newbies to the dust

Problem?

I agree that many users are getting less upvotes now than before.
My last article is also about HF 19 which I see critical for similar but also other reasons than you do.

There is no point in attempting to stop self-upvoting. People will just delegate, circle-vote, or create new accounts. Only a few of the least "bad" actors would be stopped.

Don't forget that putting large amounts of money into this platform is part of what creates the market cap for the value of Steem. Putting $10,000s in to fund the project and everyone's cashouts deserves value, too.

If you've been watching the trending page you know that this has been a problem among the whales since the beginning. The hardfork just gave the same ability, to a lesser degree, to more of us. If the ability to upvote the self is revoked we will simply fall into a pattern of the powerful agreeing to upvote each other, which will end much the same. I even wrote a parable about it 8 months ago. 

https://steemit.com/steemit/@lifeworship/the-purgatory-option-a-parable-of-steem

One of the problems that I see is that those with money seem to think that their money is worth more than the time investment that the rest of us make. Frankly, I'm tired of working on a post for hours, using knowledge that I've gained over decades, and watching it sink into the past with a payout of $0.00. 

Before the hardfork I was noticing that the more followers I gained, the fewer votes I garnered. It's good to finally be able to at least reward myself for what I've been investing for almost a year. If someone had come to me 10 months ago, and showed me my current balance, I'd have run away from Steemit and never looked back.

I hope my work has helped my dedicated core of followers in some way. I sometimes think I'm preaching to the choir, but I am now more impoverished than when I started, and without some respite from the payout failures, I cannot continue to contribute.

I wasn't aware of this and if this truly is the case then going by what you have said, I would have to agree.
It's a bit like giving yourself a 'like' on one of your own facebook posts for example. A right good old pat on the back!

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i am completely agree with you and as i am not old enough on steemit but still i think we don`t need to  vote our own post but then in the same way they select upvote option automatically to your post to get an upvote for yourself. My question is why they tick on upvote in beginning of every article automatically?