Steem has traditionally about rewarding users for the content they create and because of the 75/25 rule on rewards many users felt an obligation to post content regularly to get as much of the reward pool as possible. This behaviour often leads to poor content, post farming, comment farming, shitposting and along with a lot of self upvoting along the way.
Very few normal steemians bothered with curation and this was left up to groups that formed as communities to curate content. Many users have seen Steemit has been a "me first" arena and because of it, the platform has suffered.
Hard Fork 21 is on its way and it looks like the witnesses are all about ready to approve the new changes and we will be living life a little differently on the chain once the new changes are in place.
Just like with Steem Tribes curation and post rewards will be a 50/50 split and while that means fewer rewards for authors it does incentivize two very important user behaviours.
Curating
One would be curating other steemians and hopefully, this trickles down to authors who have been overlooked by the current system and encourages more votes being spread out across the ecosystem.
Staking
In the old system, many authors would post, get their rewards and power down and continue to do so, not that some won't continue to do the same but they will earn less from their efforts. With more rewards going to curation you will need to have a stake if you want to access those rewards, the more stake you have the more you will earn, which encourages users to keep powering up, or at least the ones who want to benefit from the new system.
What do you think? Will it help improve retention of STEEM by authors?
