Good morning all, in light of the "experiment" and the upcoming hard fork, I wanted to give people an update on where we are.

## The Experiment

For those living under a rock, a few steem whales are currently conducting a highly-controversial experiment to see what happens if whales don't vote. According to a definition [here](https://steemit.com/steem/@abit/definition-of-a-whale-and-a-whale-like-group-and-the-math-behind), a whale is an account with over 800 MVests. My clients' total vests are well over 1 GVests; I think  around 1.3 or 1.4 GV. This means that a full-power vote from my bot is a whale vote, and so is subject to downvotes from @abit or @smooth.

In order to help ensure that my bot is being socially responsible, I have changed an important parameter in my code and will now be targeting 120 votes per day (up from 85). This will increase the number of crappy posts that you all vote for, but it should help avoid us getting downvoted by the whales who are enforcing the experiment.

## The Hard Fork

This one is tricky. The upcoming hard fork has two changes that will have to be addressed for my bot to continue operating. The first is the 7-day payout window; right now, my bot checks each post after 2 days and learns how well it did. That's already pretty slow feedback, but if it has to wait a whole 7 days for feedback on what posts are doing well and what aren't, it will lose a good deal of its adaptivity that made it powerful in the beginning.

At some point I will probably modify the learning algorithm to check each post at 2 days, learn something from its pending payout, and then confirm at 7. None of you will ever need to know these details, but you should be aware that I have no idea what will happen before I have a chance to make these changes. Things could get weird, people could exploit the bot, etc.

The second change is that they're splitting the reward pool and allocating a fixed 38% of rewards to comments. I've always thought this was fairly silly, but apparently this is what's happening. In order to keep curating well, **I'll need to get the bot voting on comments.** This will be an interesting challenge, but I'll need to create an efficient way to do it. It's not obvious to me how easy it will be.

## What this all means

Things might get weird, you might start voting for bad posts, I'll try to limit the damage, but for now the bot is still operational. Of course if you want out just let me know.