- Do you notice a change in your Steem Behaviour lately? Checking your PAL payouts, your Steem LEO payouts maybe, and only then your STEEM payouts?
- Did you notice that the whale vote you were building your account on is now less defining of your feelings of success, as your favourite community rewards you even better?
- Or maybe... Did you become a decent sized curator yourself in one of the new Tribes?
- Did you get excited to start posting again because you can now skip the feed on steemit/steempeak.com and directly go to a frontend that only (well, almost) shows content you're actually interested in?
- Does your 5 cent STEEM upvote feel less frustrating because you have a 50 [insert SCOT Token Name here] upvote on [urloftribe.com] and you can even finally reward comments made on your posts?
- Do you chat in different Discord servers because they are now literally forming a (your!) Tribe?
Yes, things will change after HF21 that is now announced for August 27th and will become reality if 17 of the 'by then' top witnesses start running the code.
You will have one free (meaning it doesn't cost you VP and thus curation rewards) downvote, there will be a way to fund proposals that might help Steem ahead, and we'll see relative author rewards lowered and curation rewards upped. We'll see weird things happening with our and others post payouts because there's a curve thingy which means (aaah math!) there's no linear (more predictable) rewards anymore. Autovotes might get removed here and added there, bidbots might lose delegations (exciting, where will this stake be used for?) and so so so much things will change - creating a whole new equilibrium on Steem.
But, and that's what I'm excited about: I feel that thanks to the Tribes we have a big nice comfy buffer against all of those changes. Yes, Steem will always be our big concern, but we're probably all earning in one or more places right now. They already have different rules: 50/50 rewards are already implemented in most, and some already have a free downvote a day (maybe a bit less effective as long as it's tied to Steem and Steem doesn't have that free downvote yet, but you get the idea).
So only in the horrible worst-case scenario the chain halts like on HF20 (and this seems to be very unlikely) we'll have our Tribes to worry about, and Steem will change almost in the background, getting a bit more attention the first few weeks, until we all realize that our Tribes that we care about didn't change and we're still having just as much fun and inspiration to post again.
Hold on to that, and you'll be fine. I'm not denying that some things are going to get rough, disappointing or even frustrating. I'm just saying there's a better spread of what you experience as 'your blog' right now.
And if you're reading this post and are thinking but all I have is steemit.com!', then please tell me, because I'll help you find a Tribe that suits you. I really believe we all need at least one. If not for your own growth and learning curve, then for the above mentioned buffer it might provide you during the Hard Hard HardFork Times that are coming.
Just some random thoughts on Thursday around midnight