The change really did affect comment voting, although there are a few who 'waste' their VP rewarding comments as a way to try to boost engagement on their posts, and others.

Personally, I think that as long as there is a window, there will be 'curation rewards over content' automated voting. I still automate voting on the LEO tribe following the change to no window - I can follow the tribes curation account with being heavily penalized for following a large vote, 'late'. I can see people doing this with the base token if there was no window - following curation trails like curie, ocdb, etc.


There is a concern with regards to late self-voting though, but some of the tribes (LEO, STEM, SPORTS) have already done away with the window and at present are not suffering from late self-voting.  The reasons for this are due to a) larger stakeholders knowing that self-voting is like crapping in their own kitchen and b) methods being introduced to allow more time to downvote than upvote.  I worked with the SPORTS tribe after they introduced 3 days to upvote, and the full 7 days to downvote.  It's not too difficult to run scripts to check who's been heavily (with stake or numbers) self-voting comments (either with same account or an alt), and having a few days after the last upvote can be cast allows time to check for 'abuse'.

Thanks as always for your work on Hive! 

I don't think changing the window does much to change human behavior to be honest. The bots just get set to whatever that window is in order to maximize. Getting rid of the window entirely and moving to straight linear is what LEO has done and it makes sense on a lot of levels. One of the biggest being that it keeps things simple for new users. One of the biggest problems with all of this is in terms of attracting and retaining users is how complex it all is for people outside of crypto. 

That being said, it's never a good idea to make changes just because they are more "simple". This change also allows users to vote on what they actually like instead of worrying that they will be the last vote and lose curation etc, which is more or less what we are trying to accomplish with voting anyways, people voting on what they like. Also, agreeing with @theycallmedan above, yes the current voting system has killed comment voting as well as new/small users as they get 'penalized' until their vote is of sufficient size. I get the reasons behind some of these changes a while back in terms of trying to prevent abuse, but we have gone so far in trying to prevent abuse that we have killed on-boarding... which is the exact opposite of how/where we should be focused in my opinion...

In my opinion, the "Rewarding Curve" is one of the most painful measures adopted in the past and the most discouraging in terms of engagement promotion. As @theycallmedan said to boost engagement is a MUST do.

ok some stupid question from me, what is with flat rewards 50/50 no curve? Or curve begins after day 3 so it's not last minute voting for rewards.