I don't like the free downvotes addition. However, I can understand the strategy behind the 20 STEEM change. If you think about Youtube, before you can earn any profit from their built-in ad revenue system you have to build up a large enough following first, and if a particular video is interesting to a wide audience it will go viral.

In essence, they are trying to re-engineer the mechanics of Steem to reward viral content. Once something catches on enough to hit that 20 STEEM point there should be a snowball effect that drives it well beyond 20 STEEM. It is an interesting idea, but it is also an experiment. This could go very well or very poorly.

The free downvotes feature does have some interesting effects as well. If enough people truly do hate bidbots, they could theoretically downvote them out of the market. This new change will force bidbots to obtain more of their earnings from curation rewards rather than from upvote fees. So, while in the current state bidbotted content getting a downvote is a loss only for the buyer and not the bot service, now the bidbot service and the content producer will have more aligned interests with regard to downvotes. A potential side-effect might be bidbots utilizing their free votes to retaliate against downvoters on their customers. So, really, we have no idea what will happen here...