May the Fork be with you! A look into HF20 from a minnow

So about two days ago Steem finally deployed HF20 after almost a year of waiting for it.

Some of the major things that were done are the following:

• You can now comment every 3 seconds. Previously we are limited to only 1 comment per 20 seconds.
• If undelegating, the period to get your delegation back will be changed from 7 days to 5 days only.
• Debt ratio will be changed to 9 - 10 % from the 2 - 5 %, this is in relation to the rewards system. The reason we're receiving all Steem rewards now is because the debt ratio exceeds 5%. With it being changed to 9-10%, we will like be receiving SBD rewards on our posts.

• Curation rewards via self voting (immediately) will be voided. Meaning, curation rewards earned from it gets back to the rewards pool, bringing more rewards to genuine curators.
• Curation window will be changed from 30 mins to 15 mins.
• Account creation will be via Resource Credits, not the normal 0.1 Steem and 14 SP delegation.

Ah the Resource Credits, instead of having a bandwidth it was replaced with this so that users like redfishes and minnows who have long Steem Power be able to post, comment, upvote without severely impacting their capability to do so.

This to me was a step to the right direction because when you are starting out one of the key ways for you to succeed is to engage and comment in a lot of people's post. In this way you are making a connection and expanding your network.

[From Unsplash - Clement H]

Yet once activated HF20 paralyzed majority of accounts that were not Orca or even Dolphin levels. Those with not a lot of Steem Power was left unable to do anything with their account.

I myself who is not that active and have about more than a thousand Steem Power was left unable to post, upvote or comment even once and when I checked Steemd the RC score I had was in the negative and would take over 100 days to recover!!

Well my jaw dropped at that point but luckily I can still read posts and saw that there will be a quick update made in the code that will rectify it and so we were asked to be patient and wait for it to be fixed.

So unable to post anything gave me some time to look at some of the communities I was in before and touchbase.

It saddened me that majority of the people that were prolific posters and engaged Steemians like me was also lying low and not posting as much.

A lot were involved in other platforms and even that Steem copy cat Weku. Majority of the answers were because of the value of Steem it is hard to even get $1 dollar on posts. Losing a whale that supported the local community was apparently another factor.

There were others who were still active and were after the tokens from Steem Hunt, Dlike and Airclinic thus they have not powered down and continued to post. There were others that spread their wings and were able to find support from other communities and dapps thus their posts were still averaging about $5-$15 plus

If everything goes according to plan that account creation will be faster and SMTs will user in new users then we can expect that it will be harder to own Steem Power.

So this is the time to continue raising our Steem Power.

So having not voted, commented and posted for 2 days hopefully I have enough RC to be able to post now.