Update: It looks like the behavior I noticed may have changed. The tests I had done were prior to HF20 and crossed the HF20 activation threshold. In other words, a vote was cast under HF19 at 0 minutes, HF20 was activated, and the vote showed no value a few hours later (so 100% vote loss, not just curation rewards). I am conducting another test below with a comment that was voted at 0 minutes and I'm not seeing the same behavior but I will monitor it until payout.

One of the changes in Hard Fork 20 changes how curation works. The curation window dropped from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes. It also changed the curation rewards for the first 15 minutes to go to the reward pool instead of the author.

While this reduction from 30 minutes to 15 minutes is a great change, it introduces a situation where your voting power can be burned as much as 100% if you vote early. This is to penalize self-voting and allow curators to have the same chance for curation as the author.

What changed?

In the past, there were situations where early votes were not self-votes and actually organic curation. In fact, this was very common, especially in the last 15 minutes of the 30-minute window. Under Hard Fork 19, your vote still mattered, either the curators or the author would get the portion of the vote that was being lost in that first 30 minutes. If you really wanted to support an author, you could vote really early and give them an even larger vote by sacrificing curation rewards.

Under the new system, doing this can significantly reduce your vote value as it is now returned to the reward pool. For posts, this won't be a huge concern once people figure out the new timing and adjust to it, but for comments, I think this is a big change that will bite a lot of people in the ass.

Why are comments different?

Many authors like to engage with their readers and check replies frequently and respond quickly. This is considered a very favorable practice, but it isn't uncommon to respond to comments within the first few minutes of a comment. Especially if you are a @ginabot user and you get a notification for a mention, it isn't uncommon I can respond within a minute or even seconds of a comment. If it is a good one, I would normally upvote it. Under Hard Fork 20, a $1 vote at 1 minute turns into a $0.06 vote to the author, and near $0.00 of that goes to curators. 94% of your voting power is burned to dust. That's a huge change.

This creates a situation where users will do one of the following things:

Vote within first few minutes and lose (burn) 70-90% of their vote value
Respond later or just remember to vote later
Respond, but don't bother voting or think about voting later and forgetting

User Experience

All three of these situations result in a bad user experience. While I believe it will be fairly rare most users will try to reward a post within the first five minutes organically (but it does and will happen), comments this is a very different scenario. Early voting for comments is actually a good thing as it happens organically with high engagement.