Forked again - My opinion on HF19 its effect on steem community and a prediction

First my journey with Steem so far. I heard about Steem back in February 2017 and thought it was an amazing platform for sharing and social interaction online. I still believe this. I believe in Steem long term and can imagine there are many use cases that have not yet been realized.

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I Invested a little of my crypto-holdings into Steem and started to share some of my work and curate content. At one point I managed to make it into the top 25 of the 7 days curators list on steemwhales.com. A proud moment for me. That was probably my peak so far with Steem.

The hardfork18 came along and the rewards for my posts and content dropped dramatically. I was so disappointed that such a great platform had such an unfair distribution model. No doubt, for a long time the whales had such an huge advantage and the HF 18 just made this seem even worse to me.

Soon after seeing the effect of HF18 I powered down all my Steem. Overall I didn't do too bad out of my investment the price of Steem doubled over the period of my power down and so I ended up with a net gain. Not quite double my original investment but significant gains.

I never lost belief in Steemit and I have maintained a minimum activity level here with auto-voting and reading posts but I haven’t bothered interacting much while HF18 has been active.

I returned to Steem this week just to have a read and claim any voting rewards only to discovered a new Steem version release, HF19. Along with this was much jubilation on Steemit. A fairer model of reward distribution. Smaller curators earning more, long suffering publisher earning a decent reward for their content. Jubilation all around, almost. The equality release has hit the whales hardest and their reaction I am yet to gauge.

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My initial fears are of these whales reacting badly. They earned the most by owning the most. Previously holding more gave huge advantage. The more you held the more you earned. What now is their incentive to hold onto their Steem long term? This is particularly true for the largest holders. Their voting rewards has decreased significantly. As newer and smaller users are earning more and they have new money flowing to them with less of an incentive to build up to a whale status and hold for the longer term, I envisage more Steem being converted to other currencies in the short term.

I imagine their will be quite heavy downward pressure on the price in the short term as the whales divest from Steem. Particularly while Steem is still at its high and Bitcoin at its high.

Having said all that, this is not a doom and gloom post. I believe this is actually healthy for the Steem community as a whole. The much fairer reward distribution model is going to encourage more community engagement over the long term at the grass roots level. There will be a more gradual building up of Steem power and wealth across the wider community. People will be more likely to curate the content they like instead of chasing the huge whale voted posts. They will create the content they love instead of creating posts as whale bait. We will see more of the same growth in guilds and collaborate endeavours that have been developing. The early movers in these areas will be the whales of the future on Steem.

Ultimately in the long term I see a very bright future for Steem, with much broader mainstream adoption happening where Steem will be the go to place in place instead of medium, tumblr or reddit.

If my prediction is right and the price tumbles don’t lose hope in the long term future of Steem. Don't let it get you down its only whales burning. This is the next stage of a magnificent future.