RE: This has been a demonstration of optimal posting strategy under Hardfork 20.
During the first 15 minutes a post or comment is live, vote value goes to the author in a declining portion from 100% at the instant something is published down to 87.5% at 15 minutes. And curation value that goes to the reward pool increase from 0% of vote value up to 12.5% at 15 minutes.
Reading this again I think it's backwards. It's the "vote value that goes to the author" that they're getting rid of. The voter will still get the curation that goes to them now - the curve is steepened so it's 25% at 15 minutes - but the portion of curation that doesn't go to them will go to the rewards pool.
In practice at the moment that can easily be 12-15% of the total post rewards. So not chump change. It will undoubtedly get smaller as people stop voting early, though.
It does lead to a weird possibility of aggressively voting early in order to reduce a post's rewards, too.
Ah, I think I understand that. So they are removing the author's share of curation during the first minutes the post is live.
Of course that's a bit circular since the rewards pool goes in large part to the author anyways.
It might do something to slightly curb bid bot usage since (aside from minnowbooster) they don't adjust the vote value to account for curation.
Smartmarket also does, in fact they're better at it than MB is. But yes, the actual bidbots require you to do any curation math yourself, and I suppose making the curation math harder might hurt their market a tiny bit. But what I see on the various support forums is that there are a ton of users who aren't that sophisticated and judge whether the bot's vote size is enough for them by completely nonsensical criteria.
I guess bot users losing money is just a second-order version of the same effect.