Today there was a new steemit anouncement.

Lots of new cool features were announced and I was completely blown away by how much functionality the steemit team is delivering in such fast innovation cycles. It is really amazing.

BUT

There was one thing that shocked me:

We are changing the target number of votes per day from 40 to 5 so...

Before even reading one more word all kinds of nasty thoughts went thru my mind like doubt, the feeling of being cheated by Dan & Ned themselves as well as sadness.: "WTF 5 votes only! I want to vote all day! What are they thinking! Do they not want me on their site anymore?". After all I have invested lots of time as well as hard earned crypto assets into the steem platform over the last two months.

Isn't it amazing how many thoughts can travel through your mind in a split second. My mind was so emotional that I did not even logically compute what followed. Like so often the animal brain had taken over.

... so that more people keep their voting power below 100%. The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.

I just kept on reading... the way you read a page and have no idea what you just read at the end of it, because your mind was somewhere else.

The 5 votes made no sense and I trust the steemit team. So how could this be? Thank god my logical brain was back very quickly and I was thinking instead of feeling. "There must be something I am not getting" I thought. So I re-read the statement, this time actively processing every word I was reading:

...The purpose of this change is to rebalance power toward normal users and away from bots. You can still vote as often as you like, this change merely impacts the speed at which voting power is consumed.

Geeks are not the best communicators

Dan and team might be the best blockchain innovators but maybe not the very best communicators. The initial associations that kicked in my emotions before of course were mostly random and idiotic, just like most ankers in our brains are. We are simply not very logical creatures. But it was starting to make sense now:

• most users probably don't hit the like button on Facebook 20 times a day. Likewise the average steemit user will probably not vote 20 times per day.
• therefore most users are giving away their right to chose how rewards are distributed, which is the whole purpose of voting.
• bots on the other hand won't mind voting 20 times a day
• The steemit team has probably not chosen the Nr. 5 randomly but after data analysis with focus on the "normal user"

In addition to the 5 vote target, we have also received the ability to give each of our vote a %-age, which allows us to chop up our votes into 10, 20 or even 100 smaller votes. Or if we don't want to deal with it like most users, just keep it at 5. Smart users like dolphins and whales that understand how the system works will use this to still make 20 votes a day, or 10 or 50 or 100 if they think that's better.

Additionally this functionality allows us to weight our votes. We can give one post up to 20% of our distribution power or less if we so choose. This is good for humans and bad for bots, because bots will have a harder time to understand what they like and what will be successful. Voting is like giving away budget that we control.

In essence we are now using votes to give posts a piece of our distribution power. The target of 5 votes per day simply means that the standard %-age one vote represents would be 20% of that distribution power. Additionally we can reduce this even further to whatever small amount we want it to be. Brilliant!

So my first reaction and thought that this was a reduction to how many votes I could place in a day was simply wrong and my emotions un-logical, albeight maybe this was not explained very well.

When we think about it more closely it makes perfect sense and we can see how the steemit team has created a new feature that makes the system better by giving us more control without making it harder to use. In fact if you are lazy you can just vote 20 times a day and nothing will change.

When I read the comments of the post I saw that many people have not yet made it back into the rational state of analysis when they are complaining that the 5 votes has taken something away from them or 5 votes is not enough.

So make sure that you really think about the new functionality before you complain about it. I am sure it can be done better and giving feedback is valuable. But let's not complain about something that not even real.

I hope the not so ideal communication style of this announcement will not cost us too much confusion and the need to explain it over and over again by the @Dantheman and @Ned. If that need was there I hope this post has helped a bit.

Cheers and keep on steeming!