With the implementation of Hard Fork 19, a lot of minnows like me have noticed much higher payouts on their posts, and that's awesome! And each upvote is now worth much more than it was. But with these higher payout amounts and upvote amounts, comes a sacrifice. Now the voting power for each upvote decreases much faster than it did, about 4 times as fast in fact, meaning you can upvote way less posts and comments at full power.

Will this make users more stingy with their upvotes?

Voting power recovers about 20% a day, and that also makes it much harder to recover your full voting power back. For example, before Hard Fork 19, I had about 80% upvote power at the lowest. Now, after Hard Fork 19, my voting power hasn't gone above 45%, being 42% at the time of this post.

It has become harder for me to upvote things, because I don't want my voting power to go too low.

Could this help filter lower quality posts?

With upvotes depleting in their power so fast, I believe users will start to allocate their upvotes to only higher quality posts that deserve the upvotes, instead of low quality posts that are upvoted and asking for an upvote in return.

How can minnows change their voting power?

Minnows can actually adjust their voting power through the esteem app. Here's an article by @gmuxx that explains how to do it: https://steemit.com/hf19/@gmuxx/hf19-killing-your-vote-power-try-this

This may end up not having as much of an effect on future posts.

A lot of the posts have decreased a lot in their payout, but that is because it adjusted the payout based on past upvotes, where users were willing to give out their upvotes more freely.

What about whales?

Well, to my knowledge, whale's votes are worth more, but proportionately are now worth less. This could be dangerous, as it reduces the whales incentives to curate content and they do not have as much of a position as they did before the fork. I am not very proficient on how this affects whales, because I am not one, but to my knowledge this Hard Fork did not help them.

Overall, this will help Steemit grow.

With new users joining able to see more immediate benefits to posting, it will incentivize more new users to join and start making money and joining the community. For example, before HF 19, my upvotes didn't change a posts' potential payout, but now my upvotes increase the payouts by 3 cents. With newcomers joining in, the price of Steem will eventually increase, making this fantastic for the future of Steemit.

What do you think?

After a couple days since implementation, what do you think the effect has been/will be?

Thanks to @gmuxx @nnnhhh and @cryptologyx for helping me edit this post!

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