The 50/50 move made by HF21 was with the idea of people actually curating manually vrs the auto votes that had been used up to that point. I think at least that part of the equation has failed miserably. Don't believe me? Just look at some of the guys who usually get a nice amount of votes and rewards, follow a post of theirs and you will notice that before five minutes that post gets a few votes but at exactly the five minute mark all of a sudden it has 150 votes and well over $5.00 in rewards.
Of course this was happening long before HF21 in fact I guess this has been happening since the beginning of Steemit, but HF21 was supposed to put an end to this , because with such a huge reward as 50% of the vote going back to the voter everybody would manually curate. I made the observation that this was actually a kind of dumb rationalization because regardless of whether my vote was manual or bot driven I would still get 50% curation.
Many people disagreed with that idea, I believe by now they have to know they were wrong I mean if they don't it's just that they don't want to know it. Now is this wrong? Well it is if one of the reasons for executing a hard fork were based on fraudulent ideas because this one was a fraud, auto votes haven't stopped and the best articles aren't getting the most votes.
I can even tell you these guys with big votes are lazy I had a discussion with one of them and he actually told me to point him out a couple of good authors so he could vote for them, damn he doesn't even want to read.
Now wouldn't it be nice if some of the real big guys, you know those who even now when the price is so low can still give a $15.00 vote actually took an hour of their time to read some 20 or 30 posts and voted at 100% for the ten they thought were the best? This would help the aspiring authors enormously, and hey this whale will still be getting $75.00 in one hour just for up voting some content they like? But it seems this is just too much work, it's so much work that there are even down voting pools so they don't really have to see what they down vote they just know it is being down voted.
Why don't you big guys try it, spend one hour a day looking for good content and up vote it, OK give 20 votes, it still is the same thing, just don't go with these voting guilds, read what you vote for, and vote for it because you actually like it. I can bet you Steemit would become a much better place in very little time.
