So like it or not, this hardfork looks like it's happening. Of course there are last minute WTF things that could happen, but those are doubtful. In all likelyhood in less than a week, we'll be looking at a whole #newsteem.
I've done what I can to prepare. Instead of buying 1k Steem, I leased 20k Steem for about the same price for 3 months. We'll see if that turns out to be profitable. Even if it's not, I have more fun on Steem when I feel like I have more influence, so it's money well spent in my book regardless. I spend a lot of time on Steem, and it's one of my main forms of entertainment. I'm okay with spending some money so I can have more fun. But yea, truth be told, between posting and curating, I expect to make that back and then some, we'll see.
Besides that I did also buy a little over 500 Steem and powered it up. I've been buying a decent amount of Steem lately, but it's all gone into tribes. It's been a while since I've powered up Steem because I've been putting my liquid Steem earnings into tribes as well. Now I'm a whale in three different tribes and I'm starting to get interested in Steem again, I've definitely been a fan of 50/50 curation in the tribes, but obviously the scale is different, I'm really curious to see how it plays out on Steem.
The title of the post says predictions, so I'll take some swings.
50/50
The 50/50 split. I think this will be a net positive. It might take a minute, but in the end I think in general people will make more because more people will be interested in curating. What I think would be a huge stimulus to this is better curation tools. One thing the tribes have taught me is I don't have time to curate effectively at all, so wherever I can I offload that work to either a curation trail, or someone who volunteers as @soyrosa has done on creativecoin. This way I can earn while also benefiting the community. By following votes, I can still curate when I have time, but if there are other people who's vote I'm following for each person it's like I've cloned myself and can do that many times as much work.
I think investors much larger than me simply want to passively invest, I think instead of trying to force them to use the platform in a way that's super time consuming and unrealistic for a typical very busy person, we should be working to facilitate this demand, and figuring out creative solutions to allow them to passively invest while also benefiting the community.
The SPS
This is probably the most bullish thing in this HF to me. I think it will be huge for Steem and really be a new beginning for us.
Downvote pool
I think really large stakeholders might start to flag things regularly but beyond that the average users behavior won't change regarding downvotes. The average user wasn't not downvoting because it cost them voting power, the average user isn't downvoting because downvotes cause material harm and it's just not something people are going to ever do casually. People use Steem applications currently primarily for entertainment. They aren't coming here to fight or be the e-popo. I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but it's the reality IMHO. We'll see if I'm right or wrong.(I'm right 😎 )
Curve changes
Minnows are gonna get rekt and will have a choice to make about what they're going to do moving forward. I think more people will be curating, so people will have the opportunity to do well, but if you're getting by on making a few cents on actifit posts, or something else that doesn't particularly add much value, I think the party is probably over and you'll have to adapt.
Overall I'm not in the doom and gloom camp. I think this will be a net positive for Steem and I'm excited to move forward and have new stuff to figure out. If you remember my quote from a few posts ago, "Be like water" Adapt, be flexible, for my fellow geeks, be like the Borg. Resistance is futile anyway.
See you all in the next post.