Now first of all I do have to say that most of the drama, negativity, ugly words, bad feelings that are seen around here are mainly caused by the fact that Steem's price is so low and that there is no foreseeable event that can turn that price around, if Steem were at $2.00 we would not even be having these kinds of conversations.
But it is at >$0.14 so we are in trouble everyone has doubts and Steemit's very survival is something that a lot of people worry about. See, let's get real almost everyone who joined and will join Steemit will be with one thing in mind, make money out of whatever your mind can come up with to post and get votes which equal money. A lot of people say they joined for the community, I very much doubt this, well perhaps there are a few who did join for this reason but that group has to be very small.
And it worked, at first at least, a lot of people were able to get a good or moderate income from blogging on Steemit, it was great, I myself had days, very few but I still had them, when I made $20.00 on a not such good quality post. Of course others made money speculating with the coin itself but that is not what the platform is about so I will not talk about that. But it seems that in reality the concept doesn't work, after a time Steemit became a place where problems popped up every day and the solution to one problem just brought up two more. I tend to believe that the problem was and still is a finite reward pool and an infinite amount of people wanting to make money.
So what happened, people started to game the system, we got first of all self voting by big accounts, then we got auto votes, circle jerks, and finally bid bots. All of these are just a result of big accounts wanting to make more money than they were being able to by doing things the way it was supposed to be done. I can understand this, you invest money or time (which in reality is money) you want it back. The thing is this made the reward pool even smaller for most because the big accounts were taking a huge percentage every day.
So then the Hard Forks started coming in, each one creating more problems than it solved, one of these HF made my vote value go up by about 600% and even with my low SP since Steem's price was well above a dollar I was giving out good value votes. Of course this didn't work out either for obvious reasons. And I think after this is when bid bots really started to catch on, but the thing with bid bots is that the big winners are only the owners and the delegators, bid bot users don't make much of a profit and a lot even lose. Still they caught on and so we had that wonderful HF21 idea to eliminate them, supposedly it has happened and bid bots are completely weakened, I somehow doubt this 
But the thing is, HF21 has come and by now is settled, but the numbers don't show any improvement, if you look at 
But there is a group of people who actually think that the new ideas are great, like downvoting I have seen dozens of articles where all it comes down to is no, we are not stealing your rewards they aren't yours until they are paid to you. Sounds like before the hard fork, the same people said what do you prefer a share of an ever shrinking reward pool or a smaller share of an ever growing reward pool, surprisingly we are getting a smaller share of an ever dwindling reward pool.
So we ended up like Brexit just a lot of ready made phrases that actually mean nothing but are taken by many as the truth, a sad state of affairs. Now the hope of course is SMTs and communities, I don't think they will be any good, we've waited over two years for them and we have an alternative now, to me implementing SMTs and communities will just make things worse, their time came and went.
So does this mean Steemit is dead or at least in its death throes? Well, look if all of a sudden the price were to go to $2.00 I would give it a very good chance, at that price I would even think it could start growing again, but to reach that price you have to have investors who see an incentive and all I can see here for now are downvote wars, shit posts, low activity, not much engagement. Now I really don't know what big investors look for in a crypto currency but by the way things look, what Steem offers just isn't it.
