Its been a while since I talked about Steemit.com itself and maybe someone can confirm with me or not on whether we will be having a Hardfork?
The new Hardfork which would be HF 20 is said to happen before the end of January? But its been quiet.

Images By: @simonjay

The hardforks are basically big changes on our Steem blockchain that affect many things like for example voting, curation, delegation etc.

The Hardfork 20 promises to as usual bring exciting changes to the Steemit.com platform so lets just take a look and some of the more (major) ones.

-Account Creation

picqery.com

Some may not know that there are those of us who created an account that had to wait days, weeks, months before getting to actually have full excess to use it.
And this guys was often in part to blame for the slow user retention rate issues that Steemit.com was having.
Well the devs have worked hard for a long time now on this and was even heavily discussed at steemfest 2 the next Hardfork should see even faster account creation but not only that they have managed to avoid the small fees cost that come with most transactions on the platform.

-Smart Media Tokens

Ever since @ned talked about this its being discussed heavily.. but wont SMT's most likely have their own hardfork separate from hardfork 20?
Most likely yes but it as not stopped people talking about it and hoping to see it in light for hardfork 20.
Yes @ned promised that SMT's would be available early 2018 but its been quiet and I think along with others that its meant for the first half of the year so maybe don't expect to hear much about the SMT's before the end of April.

-Communities

associatenow.com

People are nuts for this but we really don't know exactly how this will be implemented just yet.
We know that they are basically going to change Steemit.com making it more social but like I have said this could be done horribly or great we just have to see what they come up and if it will require changes.
Please be aware that communities will likely bring a heavy drastic change to the site so possibly have its very own hardfork all together.
Again we just dont know, I personally love steemit.com how it is and hope communities will add value and not massive changes.

-Curation

Those of you who know me will know this is what I am normally most interesting in hearing about I love curation while everybody is going wild about Communities I am more interested in the changes with curation.
In the current curation system yes this does change if you been here long enough to experience it, voting circles are effective but changes to curation could effectively discourage voting circles by creating minimum thresholds of voting power not sure exactly whats the plan for this but also self-voting could get shrunk under new rules which could make the author's vote on themselves worth about as much as that same vote on another's persons post entry meaning a possibly %25 gain instead.

Some have pointed out some of the rules should be put more on the whales because minnows and dolphins have a much tougher time growing and cant effect the rewards pool as much.