I also upvote many comments as well, and while I still find myself often tweaking the ideal "vote weight" for my voting habits, I've found the slider to be rather indispensable in "dealing" with the HF19 changes.

A big part of the problem that I see is that the slider is not available for those with under 500SP.  If smaller users (say, 50 to 100SP minimum) could also adjust their vote weight as they become more familiar with the platform, that may also help balance things out a bit more.

I don't know fully, but I have seen bit changes. 
01. My posts not getting visited.
02. No notification is appearing, other than SBD transfer.
03. If anyone mentioned me in the post previously I got a notification that someone mentioned me in the post. But Now nothing is happening. 
04. The Value of SBD getting lower and lower every day.

It's hard to see how a financial reward, however small, can be attached to curation when the average person on this site doesn't really know much about how it works and is just randomly upvoting whatever takes their fancy. I appreciate the opportunity to be paid for this menial task, but it seems that unless you know how to game the system you can't make anything resembling a wage on Steemit, and the few dollars you make are not worth spending your leisure time on, when you are just trying to relax after your "real job".

I only joined about 2 weeks ago.  I was only here for a couple days before the hardfork.  It does seem like a few people are reaping the major benefits.  I am not against this - I don't think anything should be super easy.  I am under the impression that it took those whales a lot of time/effort/ or money to get to the point they are at.  

Also, people seem to be fixated on more users.  Won't that make it even harder to make any meaningful rewards as a minnow?

Thanks for the perspective.  Yes it does seem the same people are always at the top with their photos and recipes.
  I can say I am not putting in long hours writing and researching articles these days, like I was.  I believed good writing and good content would rule the day.  Money shouldn't be the driving force, but it is incentive to continually produce good content. The biggest change  for me was being able to upvote those who took the time to comment.  I read and commented a lot and I often run out of $$ to tip comments and replies. Especially good articles with only a few views.

Today I have 550 followers. I noticed that out of 550 I only get a few clicks. I wonder if there is something missing. The hard fork was good for one day for me. the first day. that was it. after that, unless @librosist see it, I am getting $.25
**But, who am I to complain. I never posted anything on youtube or FB and expected money I just knew I wasn't getting paid.**

It would be nice to see the votes spread out a little more evenly that's for sure. Although it does feel good now that my vote has a value lol I have mixed feelings about hf19

You hit the nail on the head, I could not put it better

It is a great article sir.. very helpful information.. thanks for sharing.. keep it up..

A very astute observation Mr @calaber24p it appears that the motivation has moved to profit over quality of information. I have noticed this as well with some very good articles I felt were worthy of a good showing bringing in less than a buck on several occasions. It has led me to the exact same conclusion that the only thing that seems to pay very well on steemit is curation of those who get all the upvotes no matter the value of the content. It is as if content is irrelivant as the old adage in; "money talks and BS walks" stand true once again.

I am not sure what can be done, except that we keep trying to support and promote the worthy content as such the case might be. So good job at making this known and hopefully it will have a positive impact on some very talented writers as well as adding some awareness to this problem.

I'm still a little new here but I had the same thought when 19 came out. I'm definitely more discerning with my votes now as I have only a few to go around. That's okay. I still like it when someone reads what I wrote. Even if they don't UpVote. I guess that means I'll have to try harder next time! Good post.

I fully agree on this and am hoping the next hard fork would be for the better as well. There will always be people jumping hoops and trying to rig the system, and one hard fork doesn't fix it all. It's one drop at a time to fill the bucket. Hopefully the next hard fork takes us further unto steem becoming a better platform.

@calaber24p this comes at a time that I am very curious to know how steemit really works. thank you so much for sharing.

@calaber24p this makes alot of sense, I know somewhat understand why some great content blogs make cents. hopefully the correction is made and things move in the right direction. Thank you for keeping us informed!

You make a lot of sense here. I have personally experienced a drop in activity since hf19. And I can't help noticing my peers buy their whale votes in order to make it worthwhile. I have also noticed the plethora of services offered to buy influence. It is the same story over again, the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. The increased "influence" noobs was supposed to get with hf19 is a short lived one. The votes cast in one session quickly drains the power to such a degree it is pointless.

What is needed is more influence from day one and less influence to those who can be described as gods under the current conditions.

I'm not complaining on my own behalf, but the long term growth will die off without motivated recruits. And if I don't see a real incentive for noobs to join, I'll be gone before everything stagnates.

minnows having hard time wats the solution in current scenario?

My thought is, "Communities" in the next HF will radically change the game here. A lot of voting could be confined to niches, and the big earners, who produce generalized content, will earn less.

Reassessing the ideal vote strength after HF20 should be interesting!

I agree with too far, I just hope we didn't fall off the edge

My account became active later half of June, so I guess I started about the same time that hard fork 19 was implemented.

What I've noticed is that my posts are not getting anywhere near the eyeballs or responses that they did in the beginning.  Most posts have perhaps one vote and no comments.

Now -- I'm not opposed to earning my followers.  I think picking up a follower or two per post is about right.  And I don't have hundreds of followers, so I can understand how my posts get drowned out by those who have thousands.  And, seriously, I've been on this site for a few weeks, so I'm not complaining.  I don't have anything to complain about until I've been on here for a couple of years without getting any traction.

But most of what's on my feed are resteemings and a few posts by whales that are making hundreds of dollars for articles that seem like they took about 45 minutes to create.  My posts essentially disappear without a trace.

I think a lot of what is going on are people (and bots?) piling into posts that have large dollar amounts in front of them, thinking that they can get a piece of that money by commenting, but of course the comments are just fluff.  They just look for what is trending and vote on that, and true original interesting content is drowning underneath this.  And the truth is, skulking around the feed and jumping on posts early is a way to make some money -- not very much, but some.  But with only 10 votes per day, no one is going to waste a vote or time commenting on a post by a nobody because that post is not going to earn any money.  So why bother voting or commenting on it?

Meanwhile, I see posts that are actually thoughtful and engaging that are making 50 cents, but they have very little in the way of fluff comments.  So what is driving the whole thing is herd behavior chasing money.

The existential question here is this:  is it possible to create a voting and rewards system that rewards good content and good honest posters without being overwhelmed by parasites?

In some ways this reminds me very much of Amway (I'm not particularly anti-Amway, just to put this into perspective -- no pejorative intent meant by this comparison.)  Amway was an attempt to take an existing societal function, the sale and distribution of household goods, and use this energy cascade to power a social network, just like Steemit is an attempt to take an existing societal function, cryptocurrency, and use this energy cascade to power a social network.

People would join Amway for the money just like people join Steemit for the money.  And the people who joined Amway first will always stay ahead of the people who joined later,which is how it looks like Steemit is working out.  Everyone purchased their stuff through Amway because this is how money was generated just like everyone publishes their stuff on Steemit because this is how money is generated.

Amway greatly rewarded those who hustled and kept grinding and were somewhat charismatic.  I think Steemit is heading that direction as well.

The only thing I didn't like about Amway was that there was a certain treadmill quality to it, it smelled a little like a collection of thieves sometimes because it tended to attract a lot of people who were into get rich quick schemes.  People would join, try pitching the idea to friends and family, quickly realize that this was uncomfortable and mostly unproductive, and would become inactive.  So the motivation setup was a setup for failure.

The problem was, they wouldn't necessarily join because Amway had amazing products -- they would join and tolerate the products because that's how the money was made.   You would buy as much as you could through Amway whether you liked the products or not because the more you and your network bought, the more you made.

I don't want Steemit to head in that direction.  I'm not pretending to have any magic answers here, but somehow the focus needs to sharpen in on rewarding quality content.  If we let it wander towards the network feeding itself focus, of sending as much stuff through our own network as possible because that's how the money is made, then it will degenerate into a MLM phenomenon, and that would be a terrible tragedy.

I used to be very active on the libertarian section of the online Wall Street Journal before they put up a paywall and shut the user generated content aspect down. I would write essays every few days, get into long debates with others -- and I did it all for free. Why?  Because the content interested me.

That's what we need here.  I'm just trying to decide in my own head whether adding the money aspect makes that better or kills it.

Guess which way that goes is in our hands.

I have similar thinking with you. I prefer give priority to give steemians who leaved comment on my post also steemian who give only vote for me, because  they are true follower for me so I must appraciate it. Also I give vote for potential newbies and authors. Nice posting.

I agree with you in the short term - we've all been caught off guard by our newly powerful 100% upvotes.

I think the community is starting to catch on though - in some cases, this actually enables us to support the newer / under-appreciated authors. When I see a quality post with less than a dollar of upvotes, I can crank my vote to 100% and provide 40-50 cents - while hardly a huge payout, it's a notable difference compared to my previous 100% vote of 5 cents.

Depends on how the community uses it. I could definitely agree with you that a sweet spot might be a slightly less powerful 100% upvote, maybe half as strong as currently set.

I suggest if the voting slider includes how much estimated vote power you have remaining, people would be using the slider more often and more carefully.

I am seeing a lot of the same things. I have seen a lot less interaction over the last week, and my posts are thorough, unique, original content and I just am kind of surprised after having such good interaction the first week or so I was on here to seeing such a rapid decline. I hope to see some new concepts for H20.. But as I always say, I am hopeful if we all just keep sticking with it and building our SP and friendships here, we will eventually get noticed for our good content even if it doesn't feel like it right now. My followers are going up - so hopefully more interaction will too!

I fully agree with you. I am not long on steemit, but I definitely liked the platform before HF more. The voting culture especially on the minnows level was different and more encouraging. Now we have a hard time and have to be very patient.

I've posted about this issue several times on the platform. But Steemit's #1 goal should always be to encourage new users to get to a "middle class" level on the platform, rather than helping popular authors make even more money.

The quadratic voting system is doing exactly the latter one, and it's for the worse. The issue is that they actually think this is a "good thing" and that popular users *should* get a disproportionate amount of the rewards. 

I think that's a big mistake, and it will only encourage the majority of new users to dump the platform in the long-term. Plus, it will give Steemit a bad image outside of the platform, similar to how Digg got the reputation that it was "gamed", so people started moving on to Reddit, a much more democratized platform in comparison. Right now, the Steemit founders seem to be moving in the Digg direction, rather than the Reddit direction.

I'm new to Steem, but I've read the whitepaper, the wiki, and dozens of posts before signing up. I think your target of 20 to 25 votes a day is about right... I do however suspect that the same people aren't always landing on the trending tab because of financial incentives. That's definitely a part of it but it's also that they're the only ones that produce quality content that you might see in  a magazine or major media site. There's a very low barrier to entry to sign up here and unfortunately the number of users that can write compelling content is the minority. Which isn't a dig against Steem users, it's just the reality that producing content that is popular is hard. It's a skill that takes time to learn.

I agree with your thoughts.

I also think it might be great if we had a separate flagging power. I wrote an article on it earlier tonight. That would allow us to flag out some of the spam in places like the "Business" tag in Trending, without using up all our voting power in a negative fashion that helps no users directly (beyond the reward reallocation) and nullifies curation rewards, does not build followers, etc.

<center>![Charlie Crazy.jpg](https://steemitimages.com/DQmUw7wCkywEuFjKofXVv7UEnXYq17BtHQ2wFG5X3ubGG3T/Charlie%20Crazy.jpg)</center>

<center>*This is how I feel trying to find new, quality content in Trending or Hot right now.*</center>

I have not changed my voting habits at all since the hard fork. I still vote about 70 to 80 votes per day on posts and comments that I like.

What a splendid and reasoned article. I completely agree. Unfortunately we are seeing less voting and less interaction and people sticking to the people they know for votes.

I think, due to the fact, that is very slowly recovering Voting Power to vote have become less. 

What do You think, should we not lower the threshold VESTS from 500 to 250, so we, beginners, could adjust the Power of the Vote?

For new on the platform is not easy to get known and get upvote no matter if your blog is good or not

>Right now instead of seeing many people spread their voting power out, they are all incentivized to vote on the same 10-20 people every single time they post an article, leaving many people out of the loop now. 

This is the biggest issue that I see right now along with the fact that some are upvoting themselves almost exclusively. Or the circle jerk groups that are essentially doing the same thing. The idea was right but didnt work out well.

I made some $$$ for about 1 week after Hard Fork but now it doesn't seem to be adding up