This whole blockchain/crypto thing has been a bit of a disappointment for me. It promised so much change but eventually, that fizzled out and it became a scramble for money. I don't know which is worse, fiat currency speculation or crypto speculation?
When I initially started on blogging on Steemit, the returns were great but more importantly, there were many groups that I could direct my earnings who were actually doing beneficial things in the real world. Combine a little hard work with the capacity to direct the results of that work to folks who needed it and you have a match made in heaven. Separate it from fiat currency and oversight from a bunch of nefarious rogues and you had a tool for wreaking massive social change from which environmental change would flow.
Then it got taken over by whales who's influence came not from work but from how many bucks they had put in. Big investment, big clout. But it wasn't the whale as an individual who had the influence. Keeping with the oceanic metaphor, every whale had a cloud of what I call 'suckerfish' lurking around them. These suckerfish slavishly voted on whatever the whale voted on and drove up the value of the post. A lot of bots and accounts came out to try and boost the earning power of the tiny accounts - minnows they are called and they provided a lot of encouragement but ultimately, it only meant a few more cents for each post. Some were purely altruistic, needing no investment and some needed delegation before sending votes your way. Steemit Basic Income was and still is the most effective at doing this job - join it if you haven't already.
That was around the time of all of those 'steemit to the moon' kind of crap posts that had no value in their content but just rehashed other people's predictions and made a pretty penny being upvoted by fools. The amount of power that went into fuelling the computers pumping up this kind of tripe would have fueled economic development in several small nations.
So, I decided to give it all a break - I left Steemit to its own devices and started working in earnest on my own website ligayagarden.online. and if I have got my story right, while I was gone, one giant whale ruined it all for everyone and here is where something positive came out of the wreckage that that whale produced. I thought my $5k USD valued account would weather any storms that would come while I was away. Wrong!! It was knocked down to $230 USD when I returned!
It is fortunate that folks could and still can form communities and a lot of folks made what is noted in some circles as the biggest and best example of the democracy that blockchain technology allows. The broke away and formed the platform upon which we sit reading and writing right now, Hive.
I didn't get involved in Hive for a while. I couldn't see it starting with the same wild idealism that Steemit started with, then getting sucked in to the whirlpool of finance and investment that happens when you peg anything to a currency.
I came back after, probably, a year and checked it out. What I noticed pleased me more than I had expected because I saw that there is a lot more emphasis on communities here. Some even had their own tokens to work with. That had a lot of potential that I got interested with and , with guidance from my friend, 
Sadly, some of the old good ones had become defunct. Naturalmedicine was one that I had the most hope for in the early days but it had sunk beneath the waves but there were new and better forms that had grown. HiveGarden, Stem and Buildit are my favourites. I do tag a few others, especially Leofinance becuase they seem to be actively doing some very constructive work. I'm sure I'll find others as time goes on.
Once back into relatively regular blogging in those communities, I started to investigate the tokens that are around but that's something for the next post.