With Hardfork 19, the target daily votes are set to be down from 40 to 10. Each vote will cost ~2% of your total VP, up from ~0.5%. Sure, your influence for each full strength vote is greater, but so is everyone else's. If you're a regular curator making more than 10 votes per day, you'll be crowded out from the reward pool by casual voters. The more active you are, the greater the loss is.
I have mentioned several times before that historically about 3% posts on Steemit are "good". (With the usual subjectivity disclaimer etc) Previously, this would mean roughly 50 good posts every day. Not to mention hundreds of comments. However, with a dramatic increase in activity following the price bump, we are seeing post and comment counts skyrocket to levels not seen in 7-8 months. There's a significant influx of new users, many of whom are bonafide bloggers and vloggers. I'd say there are over a 100 promising authors join in the last 24 hours alone. At the current voting target of 40 it's already challenging to reach out to even a fraction of them. At 10, all but a small handful of these users are going to go unnoticed. There are very few curators actively digging deep through the new feed, and penalizing them so heavily is a net loss for the community.
Hypothetically, if Steem were to go viral, there could be 100,000 posts and 500,000 comments per day. This is a conservative estimate, given Reddit sees 10 million+ posts and 100 million+ comments every single day!
Are we really going to force users to vote on only 10 posts out of millions? This is too restrictive and sucks all the fun out of curation. People should just be able to vote freely, not constantly think about managing their VP so strictly.
I'd also like to point out that since the daily post count went up to the 3,000 range, some bots have gone offline. Particularly, the Winfrey Guild can't keep up anymore. Evidently, the 40 target is already too much for bots to handle. It'd be fair to assume that if there are 100,000 posts in a day across a diverse range of sub-communities, bot crowding will automatically become unprofitable and a non-issue. Not to mention, there'll be far more manual users, further aided by the linear curve; effectively crowding out the few "good bots" left. Don't need to restrict manual curators to 10 votes per day as well.
I don't have a solution, but something to think about.