it's a hard fork, not a fluffy one, but it will be quite dusty!
TL;DR - HF21 will make my job a lot harder, but the mission will continue. I will take a quick nap on fork-day, but I will carry on fluffing up dust right away, once the fork has settled.
The dust situation will get worse after HardFork21. Right now, the SP-requirements to generate a dust-proof reward with a single vote is at almost 1.7k SP. With "convergent-linear" rewards after the Fork, this will basically be doubled to well above 3k SP!
Well, convergent linear rewards, but to be more specific: It's the relation of upvotes to rewards. Technically the relation between "rshares" and "claims", but for simplicity, let's just keep calling it votes and rewards here.
It takes effect when the collected votes on a post are converted into reward-claims on the seventh day. Every post and comment made since yesterday will already be affected by the new reward-rules.
Under the current conditions, the relation between votes [rshares ]and rewards [claims] is perfectly linear, 1:1, shown as the blue line in the graph to the right. The new rules will change that relation into what has been dubbed a "convergent linear" one, shown here in red.
It's been called that way because it starts off slow and then converges gradually towards a linear relation as more votes are being collected.
It doesn't look all that bad at first, but that graph is shown on a scale that's relevant only to a super-whale-vote, or applicable to a post with trending-level rewards. That's obviously not the kind of stuff I am concerned with.
After zooming into the graph to get a better look at how this will play out on a dolphin-scale, the problem becomes a lot more visible.
The new rewards compared to the old ones actually start of at a quota of about 0.5:1 and it won't get close to 0.9 before $2.50 in total rewards have been reached. On my end of things that translates to:
Twice the voting power will be needed to get to the same level of dust-proof rewards: $0.02.
If you want to know all the math behind this in full detail, I strongly suggest you check out this post by 
I will definitely carry on fluffing up all the dust I can, but unfortunately, as we know now, that will only be about half as much as before.
I am already losing a lot of the dust that I'm watching due to time-outs. I just cannot get to all of it in time with my own limited voting power.
With HF21 many users who have been able to vote comments above the dust-limit by themselves so far, will no longer be able to do that anymore. In theory the demand for fluffing up dusty rewards will only increase due to this.
It remains to be seen if more people eventually just stop upvoting comments all together. That would be really sad, though. Engagement is such an important part of keeping this platform alive and you know I strongly believe it should also be rewarded accordingly, too!
I'll continue to offer the free memberships on my watch-list, especially for low stake users, but you really shouldn't expect more than a rather seldom occasional fluff from it. Please consider supporting the project with a small delegation, I'll give better priority to your dust in return, too.
@Fraenk has already taught me to properly calculate the dust-levels after the fork and I am ready and set to take on the challenge.
In order to avoid any potential issues with intermittent RPC-node unavailability and also to just generally get around the administrative overhead for my caretaker, I'll simply take a short break around August, 26th to 27th.
I'll switch into overdrive-mode on Sunday night, fluffing up dust until my voting-power goes down to around 50%, then I'll shut down to wait for the fork to happen. If everything goes smoothly I'll be back Tuesday evening, well rested and ready to fluff up some post-fork dust right away.
If you are a small user and you miss the opportunity to give some appreciation to the best comments under your posts, I'm here to help you!
If you're the one leaving those great comments and you're receiving dusty votes from well meaning users, I'd like to help with that, too!
Or maybe, despite having plenty of SP, sometimes you're just spreading your love too far and too wide to stay above the dust requirements? Don't stop, that's awesome! Let me try and help you a bit!
Apply to get on my watch-list in the comments or via discord.
I reserve the right to scan your account for spam and/or excessive self-voting or other shady business, but any genuine user creating content or participating in engagement on this platform is more than welcome to enjoy my services!
If you have some SP to spare, please consider making a delegation to help me with all that fluff.
And if you're ever disappointed in me, you can cancel your delegation at any time and you won't have lost a penny.
This is an experiment in solidarity and community-support, built to foster bottom-up growth and genuine engagement on the platform, any attempted abuse of my services will result in permanent blacklisting.
They are the ones making this possible.
Supporters get priority treatment for their incoming and outgoing dust
A lot of my available SP is delegated by some generous some steem-witnesses,
if you're enjoying this service you might consider giving them your approval.
You can delegate here: 5SP | 10SP | 25SP | 50SP | 100SP
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