I've been doing the math on the way RCs will affect plankton and new users. It's not pretty folks.
Now I'm not even going to bother with addressing the question of how the fork was done and the snafus along the way causing people to temporarily not be able to make full use of the platform. I'm only going to focus on what it looks to be the intended way the system will work for everyone after the transition's kinks get worked out by next week.
If you're a plankton or anyone with the default 15 SP still (which could be someone on here a few months, since your 15 SP free delegation gets taken back as you earn your own SP), hold on to your hat.
Using Steemd to See What You Can Do
Looking at someone with 117 SP on steemd I can see the following:
Enough credits for approximately:
0 comments (16 after recharge)
1 votes (79 after recharge)
1 transfers/powerups (87 after recharge)
I presume that includes posts, so one post and one comment per day.
They also get about 10 upvotes they can give. Planktons, you might as well skip using the slider on Busy or SteemPlus and just give 100% upvotes every time, because even if you have VP left, you won't have enough RCs to vote more than 10 times before your VP recharges anyway.
You can look and see exactly what you can personally do by going to that Steemd url I gave you above and then adding your username (with the @) at the end, no spaces.
What This Means
Well I'm hoping it means stuff is still off and the calculation of what you can do with a given amount of RCs (based on SP, so really with a given amount of STEEM), is also still off. I hope it really was not the intention with this hardfork to take the legs out from under any plankton who can't buy STEEM.
Is the site now meant only for people who can afford to buy STEEM?
When I'm training people to get started on here , I always tell them to comment lots and wait to start posting regularly until they've attracted enough followers by commenting. But at 2 comments per day, of course anyone will get discouraged before they've build any sort of following.
I had left about 3,000 comments by the time I reached 100 posts created. That means that if I was posting once a day, I was commenting 30 times per day. The "secret to my success" was only possible because I could comment so much, left good comments, and so built a following of active people on here pretty quickly.
I had people reading my posts and commenting on them within my first couple months, and this was the encouragement I needed to keep going long before I had the money to buy STEEM.
I see no reason why everyone shouldn't be able to have the experience I have if they can put in the time and effort I did, and have the ability to write good comments and create good posts. But this new system clearly doesn't agree.
Clearly the priority now is people who can buy STEEM.
Can't afford anything other than the free delegation? Then hang around if you must, be really you aren't wanted here. Not according to we fellow Steemians, but according to those who make the rules.
This truly saddens me.
What will become of this wonderful place when so many new users, and even newish users already here, all leave in frustration because they just can't interact with the blockchain?
This has now effectively become a pay-to-play system.
My only hope is that the numbers I'm seeing on Steemd today are just more inaccuracy caused by the unexpected consequences of the fork. Next week we will see that at default 15 SP you can comment 10 times per day and upvote 20 times per day (making voting sliders for plankton reasonable still).
What do you hope to see next week?
What do you worry you will see?
