RE: Steem Velocity Hardfork - Hardfork 20
I see some value in a very short window. With no window you can have a rush of bots all flooding to get in the very first block of certain known-to-be-popular content, which could be viewed as a sort of unintended denial of service attack. A ramp that forces bots to pick what each believes to be the optimal time over a short window rather than all trying to be first at the exact same moment may be better for purely practical reasons of spreading out blockchain load.
But IMO this should all happen over bot timescales (something like 15 to 60 seconds at most) rather than human timescales, and ideally can be ignored by human curators rather than introducing the whole 'optimal time to vote' complication as is the case now.
Removing it entirely as you suggest may also be okay though.
I was thinking about suggesting the removal of the voting time as well, but like you said, if you remove that, the bots will have a huge advantage over the human curators. I've had GINAbot tell me that someone voted on my new post before it even told me that I had created one. The goal should be to leave a small period of time to let the humans get some curation, then open it up for regular votes and whatever else.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. You've been around for a while and seen a lot of the changes, so you have a unique perspective on how to make it work well.