The hardfork that carried the version number 20 with it is now behind us and the dust is settling. Although many people are already aware of the changes it brought, we'll recap some things for the sake of documenting and bringing less-informed people into the know.
Voting changes
Do not vote! Alright, jokes aside, keep voting, just change your voting habits a bit.
Namely, Hardfork 20 introduced a change, where voting before the 15-minute mark doesn't give any curation rewards to the voter, but instead sends the curation value that would have been earned back to the rewards pool. There were lots of automated bots and uninformed users who were still voting before 15 mins, so the rewards pool increased quite a bit much to the delight of the authors and informed curators.
Voting after the 15-minute mark gives all maximum curation rewards to the curator.
However, we do not recommend you to shift all your voting habits. While you could vote for posts after the 15-minute mark, which is entirely possible if one takes time to read a longer post, we suggest taking a 50/50 approach on comments.
Comments sometimes should be responded to immediately to keep the conversation going, and sometimes not. Lose some rewards, grab some rewards. Use your best judgement. If you wait on interacting with your readers, you risk losing some valuable information.
In addition the way dust votes work has been modified a bit:
The Dust Vote Threshold was a rule that prevents the occurrence of extremely weak votes and was implemented to combat blockchain bloat. Accounts had to possess about 1 SP for a 100% Voting Power vote to successfully post to the blockchain. If a vote below the required threshold is placed, it was rejected by the blockchain. This can create a bad user experience for new users, as their votes can fail for seemingly no reason.
The Velocity Hardfork (HF20) changed how the Dust Vote Threshold works by allowing users with any amount of SP to cast votes as long as they have sufficient RCs. Votes that are below the threshold will be posted to the blockchain but they will have no impact on rewards. This will allow users to have a better user experience on all Steem-based applications by enabling them to vote any time they choose (regardless of the size of their vote), provided that they have enough RC's of course.
We believe this makes a better overall experience that ensures everyone has a voice on the Steem blockchain.
Resource credits
If you don't rock thousands of Steem Power, you might have noticed that interacting on the Steem blockchain just got harder for you.
Every action you do, consumes some of those precious-precious Resource Credits. And with a smaller Steem Power, they drain so fast....
One of the major changes in the Velocity Hardfork is a change from our existing Bandwidth system to a new-and-improved system based on Resource Credits (RC's).
Steem is one of the only freemium blockchains in the world. The new RC system will make it the most advanced freemium blockchain in the world without compromising the existing features and functionality that make Steem such a powerful platform for building DApps.
So what help is for you there? On Minnowbooster Delegation Leasing Market, you can request a Steem Power lease order from investors. A 500 Steem Power delegation should give you enough Resource Credits to write a 100+ comments, do a 100 or more votes and transactions, before your stack of credits is depleted. Remember! If depleted, you will have to wait for them to recover (5 days from zero to 100%), but with a Steem Power delegation, you'll have a bigger supply of them and you won't be caught pants down when needing to reply to or voteup a good comment.
Be prepared!
Summary
As you can see the changes made to the blockchain in HF20 are extremely comprehensive and we are proud to say that the Steem of now is not the Steem blockchain of the past. We've been hearing lots of positive things about the new Steem experience as well so that's worth noting.
So now you are armed with 2 good tips and can start tackling the battlefield of post-HF20 Steemit. Good luck, everyone!
In-Text Citation Source:
https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/steem-velocity-hardfork-hardfork-20
Image Source:
Pexels
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