Has Hard Fork 19 led to more self-serving on Steemit?

We are now post-Hard Fork 19 and are going to see many posts covering analysis of change over the coming days and weeks.

This post is based on a conversation I had with another Steemian which got me thinking a lot. His upvote value increased to $90 from about $5 following the lastest Hard Fork. However, today he noticed this value had reduced for the same level of voting power.

Why did this happen?

I have a theory about this which I would like to share. Let's first look at the big picture for a minute. Assume the total daily reward pool available for author and curation rewards is the same every day (so we're taking steem price movement, account growth etc. out of the equation).

Now, the value of someone's upvote is a function of their Steem Power BUT it is also a function of the level of Steemit's total daily voting activity - the number of votes across the platform.

Let's think of votes as belonging to two categories: self-votes and content votes.

Now here is my theory...

I believe that following Hard Fork 19 the shift in voting power has caused more self-voting than before.

It is clear to see why this would happen.

Let's say that before HF19, the voting power was split 90/10 between whales and non-whales.

Given how exposed whales are and the fact that some of the biggest whales are heavily invested in the future of the platform, I believe they are less likely to self vote and exhaust all the voting power for personal gain. Such behaviour would attract unwanted attention and damage their reputation.

In addition to the above, many of the largest whales will not exhaust all of their voting power. I'm pretty sure if @Dan or @Ned were to use all their votes, there would be very little left. So this propensity to vote is a factor in all of this.

Now let's look at the situation post-Hard Fork 19. Let's assume the split is now 70/30 between whales and non-whales. The shift in power has caused upvote value to increase significantly among non-whales.

Given the larger number of these accounts and the less exposed they are, the level of self-serving behaviour on the platform is going up! I have seen this a lot since the change. In one case today, I saw a user with 11k SP upvoting all his comments such that he was getting $8 per comment.

In addition to the higher propensity to self-vote among non-whales, the extent to which they are burning through their voting power is greater.

I think all of this will cause the voting value to fall as an adjustment takes place.

A personal view is that if we remove self-voting from the equation, the voting behaviour becomes more akin to how it was before but I appreciate now (thanks to advice from Hive account@demotruk) that self-voting has a valuable purpose if not misused.

In summary, I like what Hard Fork 19 had done for author rewards, not self-serving behaviour.

Thank you for reading this post.