The two biggest changes revolve around self-voting and curation rewards.

Here's the condensed version

To get the most earnings from your own vote after the Hard Fork 20 update goes into effect:

DO NOT upvote your own post when it's created
DO instead wait until the post is 15 minutes old and then vote.

A longer, more in depth explanation is provided below.

Changes to Self-Voting Posts and the Curation Penalty Timer

Changes to voting on your own post when it's created.

Right now there is a curation penalty for voting on a post before it's 30 minutes old. When you vote on your own post when it's first published, all of the curation you would have earned from the vote is instead given to the author (which in this case is you.) So voting on your own post gave you a larger cut of the earnings.

After the Hard Fork 20 updates, this cut of the curation reward will instead be put back into the *rewards pool and NOT THE AUTHOR. So if you still vote for your own post when it's published, you will increase the payout earnings from your vote, but the curation cut will no longer be given to you. This means that the cut for curators will end up paying closer it's 25% share.

The 30 minute curation penalty is being reduced to 15 minutes.

This penalty is linear, meaning that at 0 minutes old, it's a 100% penalty of the voters curation reward. Currently, with the 30 minute rule the penalty would give 50% possible curation at 15 minutes and 100% at 30 or more minutes of a post existing.

After the Hard Fork 20 updates, this will be reduced to 15 minutes. So you'll then be able to avoid this penalty by voting at 15 or more minutes after a post has been published.

Removal of Power Down Restriction

So far, newly created accounts have been given some Steem as Steem Power. However this will be changing, where this Steem will instead be burned (i.e. destroyed) instead of being given to that account. Not only will this prevent those that sign up to just withdraw the Steem they were given, but it hopefully also helps to speed up the account creation process.

The other piece along with this is that Steemit accounts couldn't choose to power down (i.e. change their Steem Power to tradeable Steem over 13 weeks) until they had 10 time the amount they had started the account with. But after the Hard Fork 20 takes effect, users will be able to power down whenever they want. The 10-times restriction will be removed.

Final Thoughts

The changes in self voting and the curation penalty timer are the biggest pieces to a day to day user. The best strategy to maximizing what earnings you keep (after the curator's cut) is to NOT vote on your own posts when they are first published. Instead, try to wait until it is 15 minutes old and Then upvote it.

Note that this will ONLY effect voting for your own posts. For curators, things will be very similar to how they are now, just that you can now vote at the 15 minute (changing from 30) mark without any penalty.

Please upvote and resteem if you found this guide helpful.

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There are more items included in this update, but the ones listed above are what I see having the biggest impact on general users. You can find full details of the Hard Fork 20 announcement at the Hive account@steemitblog posts: