Was it as bad as I feared. Not even close, at least at the start. The minnows were euphoric. Their power went up about 50-100x as my back of the envelope math suggested and as "Equality" and Linear Rewards suggested. For that they were thrilled.
Post rewards got tweeked some. Some of my posts that were basically just boosted by a handful of whale votes went down. Some of my posts that had a more standard distribution for me of whale votes and minnow votes went up. I probably ended up breaking even overall on post value. I did see some whale powered walls lost a few thousand! I saw some minnow powered walls gain a few hundred. A few shat themselves over a few hundred on a single post!
Have I seen a concentration in the top posters? I believe I have, but I have to wait longer for data to show up in the tools I use. My squinting technique isn't very scientific. Sweetsssj made 8k in 3 posts. Great for her! But that's alarming for the platform if the price of steem isn't mooning, and especially bad for distribution while it's going down a little. King's posts are back to 3k. So, that hasn't really budged. I think I see the trending page carrying more weight overall. It isn't quite in as few authors as I thought, but it's only day 2. Posts that used to make 300 are making 1200. Posts that used to make 2k are now making 3k. Pretty sure it's a bummer that trending is getting thicker because it's not like there are any new faces in it since HF19.
But by day 2 some minnows are already mentioning that their views are down. I think I see it too. Also, number of votes on some of my posts are are down relative to what I thought they would have reached in HF18. While this seems to have at least initially been a good boost for minnow votes and post rewards; I think we're going to end up with regrets over 40/10 voting policy.
Yes you raised used curation, but you spiked trending, which was already too high and HF19 seems to have hurt views.
I like linear rewards. 10X votes are too few, and some people are just starting to notice. The first hit of this was awesome. But minnows need views leading to followers to sustainably vote them out of minnowhood... this HF discourages both from what I can tell.
Ironically it makes it harder for minnows to lift up minnows because they only get 10 votes overall. That means they can't upvote comments, their own posts, and other's posts like they used to be able to. Now you only get 10 votes total to spread between those categories. (Minnows don't get the VP slider, presumably because if they did they might not have enough voting power to actually register something on the block if they slide it down). It's harder to make friends in the comments section of other minnows when you're not upvoting each other, it's harder to grow followers without that interaction, and it's gonna be harder to mature out of Minnow Land.
$0.02