HF21 will only hurt the little ones and make the bigger ones stronger! They are just trying to protect their investment. Maybe the steem value will stay the same, but they will just get more of it!
It is an illusion that due to this change the whales and orcas will change their behaviour! Maybe they will. They will just use services like steemauto not letting their VP go to waste. But they will only support a few people, probably people with the same amount of SP.
The bidbots will not be killed, they will just get stronger and will get more delegations than ever. Delegation to those will double the ROI compared to now. They will change the way how the upvote will be calculated so that there is still a potential ROI for their users.New curation bots will be born, which will vote on the posts of their delegators once a day, according to the delegation. The profit will be shared among the delegators on the owner!
I do feel that the 50/50 will kill a lot od authors, it will increase the retention rate!
And there is nothing much we can do about it!
I did remove a lot of votes for witnesses who are in favor of the 50/50 split (some still have my vote regardless of the Yes, but that is because they are supporting or developing great things for the blockchain). That is the only thing I can do!
Great post and in line what I did write today in min!

Cheers,
Peter

It might very much wipe out many of the dolphins, pretty much everyone that has been active on the platform getting something going building their own account will get screwed if this hardfork gets a pass. I hope they just give up on making it all about 'quality content'

Dear @numpypython

> That's a big assumption - that whales aren't actively curating because they aren't rewarded enough and that by rewarding them double, they're going to become active and discerning curators.

Indeed. 

This system can only work if so called Whales would actually start delegating their Steem Power to quality curators. That would indeed allow those curators to be rewarded for their work and benefit entire platoform.

I'm simply afraid, that this will not happen. That at the end most whales will continue auto-upvoting publications of very few people, with their powerful votes and without putting any effort they will start earning x2 more than they did so far.

It surely would encourage them to slow down with powering down, which in effect would most likely bring up the price of STEEM. But that is the only positive outcome. And what would happen year from now, when those "whales" would start dumping this easily earned STEEM? 

Yours
Piotr