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@cardboard it had been discussed by witnesses and stakeholders many times and every time no one really closed the deal and said "hey let's settle on x number and go for it", I had previously called for this to be included in this HF but nothing had happened yet as just mentioned, so I took the bull by the horns and got consensus witnesses to agree on a common figure and presented it to @justinw who had said to me that if witnesses could agree on a figue in a very short window, Steemit will be happy to add it. You can see my post decision public announcement here.

. There are huge UX benefits and users won't feel like they are being robbed of curation if they vote too earl.

Now they will be robbed by bots.

While I can understand people being concerned about code being added at a late time with little discussion. (I see that as a security risk) I certainly think it is a good and solid change that supports a real end user who maybe doesn't want to understand the complicated thing that is Steem.

Read a post, like it? Go ahead and upvote and don't try to play the 15 minute game.

Personally I don't think it favors the bots, any more or less. It favors those who want to use the site in some sort of natural way.

I just remember a big farking kerfluffle when they changed it to 15 minutes; it seems kind of odd that it gets tossed in like a bill in congress that tacks on 20 unrelated things (maybe so people don't notice and get all up in arms?). This HF is tipping the balance of curation rewards (which doesn't effect us minnows very much on the curation end; will bite us on the author end), AND giving bots a better way to earn curation rewards.
I don't pretend to understand the technical side of things, but it all seems like a giant middle finger to anyone who can't buy themselves a whale ranking. The big draw of Steem to us lowly plebs is that you can earn your way up and not have to buy in like Bitcoin, and this is making that harder.
I mean, I'm not going anywhere, and maybe it'll turn out OK somehow, and I'm worrying over nothing. I'm not trying to be all hyperbolic and "Steem is ruined!!1!!11!!!1!" or whatever, it just has that feeling of when the company you work for tells you that they are reorganizing but don't worry, everything is fine, we're a family, and then three months later half the workforce is laid off.
Minnows, and let's face it, unless you can buy in from the get-go, you're going to be a plankton/minnow for a while (I'll be here two years in September), aren't really concerned with the 15 minute game because our curation rewards are pennies. It's spending an awful lot of energy to, what - earn an extra half a penny? Maybe some folks have that kind of dedication, but I doubt most of us do, let alone the real end users, or mass adoption-imagined masses. It's saving us from an effort that would be a waste of time for us to engage in in the first place.
I have hope that SMTs will make things better for us unwashed masses, but I don't have hope about the new split or one minute window. I don't hang out with witnesses and stakeholders; I don't know where they ostensibly have these conversations or if they are public; I am not a cryptographer. I'm just that regular user that got really excited at the possibilities of blockchain once I began to learn about it and has read a couple of books on the subject and reads a little crypto news (which is probably more interest than most of the masses everyone expects to come over some day from other social media). And to me, this feels like being a cog in a corporation - you don't have any real stake (just your ability to pay your rent, which is huge to you, but jack shit to the CEO), you don't have any real voice, the board/CEO/bosses don't care about you at all, you just kind of have to accept whatever gets handed down from on high and make the best of it. And me stating this feeling here is as much an exercise in futility as speaking up during a company-wide meeting: the decisions have already been made, the feelings of the little people might get lip service but that's about it.
So I guess, I don't know, I'm just venting. But I haven't spoken to a single Steem peasant who is happy about HF21 at all. They're all worried about how they're going to pay the rent. Me too.

Hey but you earned 18 STUs for this comment!

Did I? Awesome! LOL. So many tokens, so little time. :)

I have hope that SMTs will make things better for us unwashed masses

We do too!! Check out our project

You might want to consider that people who have never seen your account before aren't likely to click an external link when you jump into a conversation with nothing much to say besides the link, and instead link to a Steem post where you explain what your project is. Also, you should probably say what it is in the comment itself. Otherwise you just come off as spammy and suspicious. Especially when you have a low rep but have been here for months, and when I click on your name, you've posted once recently. Maybe your project is cool (I take it it's music-related based on your page here), but spamming people with your link isn't the way to get your name out there and earn people's trust and interest, you know?

What is the motivation of this change? From the user's perspective, it seems illogical.

It makes bot / automated votes > users organic votes. No user can compete with bots and put vote early enough to get good curation reward.

Currently, the best reward is when we vote, say, between 5 and 10 minutes. I don't think it is currently a big deal with users voting too early then and "losing" curation reward.

I've read post from forum and this sentence below is definitely not true:

(...), they just lose curation by voting earlier than 15 mins.

They may lose, they may gain. It all depends. It depends on sum of rshares before our vote, sum of rshares of our vote, time of vote and total sum of rshares after payout. But for most users in most cases the best time to vote is between 5-10. And the smaller the vote the more profitable is to vote earlier. On the other hand whales should vote at the end of the curation window.

To give a better picture, it may look like this.

@jacekw @cardboard currently the UX is terrible for users who know about the 15 mins reverse auction window, leaves a heavy cognitive load and people second guessing if they should wait to vote and often even forget to come back and vote. It also isn’t conducive to short form content and the flow of discussion. There is a small tradeoff for that with bots being able to vote sooner, but overall it means the user gets more curation and helps get the content out of superlinear to linear faster. Also there is so much content now on Steem that the bots will serve to vote on established authors and helping retain them while human users can scout for new or first time users and will overall enhance curation.