For those who don't know, currently there is a 15min vote window (reduced from a prior 30 mins) within this window the curator earns zero curation at inception and steadily rises to 100% curation earned at 15mins. When it was 30 mins, the lost curation used to go to the author, currently it goes back to the rewards pool. This feature was meant to put bots and humans on equal footing, but rather served to add cognitive load for those in the know, all of a sudden they had to decide to wait to vote or just vote and lose curation if they didn't have time.
This feature is making UX terrible and for those who don't know about it, they just lose curation by voting earlier than 15 mins. With the advent of HF21 consensus witnesses have siezed the opportunity to change this at the 11th hour thanks to Steemit agreeing to implement the change if we can come to a quick decision, after a few hours of discussion, a decision was reached almost unanimously amoung the quorum poll. The figure arrived at was 1 minute and will be included in this change.
Steemit is however cautious on this matter and voiced concern bots would have additional advantage, however authors will also benefit from bots frontrunning curation because the bots help to bring the content out of superlinear into the linear realm. There are huge UX benefits and users won't feel like they are being robbed of curation if they vote too early and perhaps didn't even know there was a penalty.
If need be we can increase it again in the next HF, there are also other frontends like DTube that have instant curation with no penalties AFAIK and Steemit is fast losing ground to third party apps because it is too slow to innovate, this could be one positive step towards keeping up with the times and preparing for short form content on Steem like forums, Twitter, Instagram and chat type apps.
RE: Forum steem