Honestly I say that the small accounts know exactly how you feel when you get "cut out" of something, that last HF happened as a direct result of having to get spammers under control even though it hurt the people at the bottom and made it more difficult for those who'd join without dubious intent in mind. You are about to suffer the same fate, they are going to do something that they consider will help the platform and maybe drive the trending garbage away as it won't pay as good after all the cuts into their profits. My hope is the fifty/fifty split will encourage people to participate by taking the time to comment after reading a post rather then just upvoting it, it may serve to encourage some time in actual participation to others then just those who wander around kissing whale butt for a couple pennies and it might also cut down on people creating sock puppets to garner conversation on their accounts...but I doubt it, they'll probably create more to make up for the loss and let's admit it, your own sock puppets are not going to down vote each other. There's so much sneaky underhanded stuff on this site it's unreal. Take the drama post the other night, the one posted with the purple emoji with his tongue hanging out. I went through the comments then started looking for gifs to create some drama with, as I was doing it I was going back and forth saying okay that gif fits that comment well, then on to the next comment to find a gif to fit that one, so forth and so on but it was late and I decided to finish it in the morning. The next morning I come back to it and all the comments changed...this being the blockchain where supposedly everything is etched in stone there's only one way that could have happened....that's that people edited up their comments to get more drama. I am not saying that's exactly what happened but if it's not then exactly what else was it?