I've been on Steemit for about 18 months, joining in January, 2018. When I started I had read as much as I could about the platform and thought it would be a good place to get started doing some writing, and it has been. From the reading I believed there would be curators randomly selecting articles that were being written until the had found a large enough group of authors to meet their goals but still be manageable. Probably a naive assumption on my part, although I imagine there are some out there that do this. I had visions of almost a Utopian environment in which content creators and curators worked together for the betterment of both groups. Utopia, that should have been my first clue that it wasn't going to be what I imagined, but I missed that clue.
After months of growing more and more disillusioned with Steemit, I have decided Steemit wasn't a long term plan to develop any writing skills I might have. Part of my disillusionment comes from the fact the curators with large SP balances don't look around for content creators they find interesting but have lower SP balances. It seems as though those with extremely high SP balances simply upvote each other leaving the peasants with low balances to fend for themselves. There's no way to develop any endeavor without some form of constructive feedback, either good or bad.
When I first started reading about curating on Steemit, I expected to find articles about how to identify potential in new authors or about different methods of finding those interesting authors. Instead, the vast majority of the articles on curating were about how long to wait after a post has been published to vote on it to optimize the curation reward. I found out about automatic voting that allowed you to place votes without ever having to read the post in question, just get the curation reward.
I read about buying votes. I was educated that buying votes on Steemit was equivalent to advertising. By advertising your posts I was told, more people would read your work and you would receive more feedback, what a joke. I also read about making a little SP by selling your votes. This works OK, as long as you have enough SP to make your vote usable. I began to see Steemit is not set up to assist new users hardly at all. New users, you know, those with virtually no SP but represent the future growth of Steemit.
I finally bought into Steemit enough to get my SP balance high enough to start buying and selling votes. I originally started buying votes through Minnowbooster and then moved to SmartSteem. This helped a little, not much but a little. Throwing in more money helped even more. It may not be the only way to grow in Steemit, but it certainly is the fastest if you have the money to invest. To bad for me it's been a bad investment, but you win some and you loose some.
This brings me to HF21 and the further disillusionment with Steemit. In my opinion, cutting the author rewards shows just how out of touch those in charge of Steemit are with how hard it is to get started and build a decent account in Steemit. What it does allow is for them to sit back with their automatic voting and watch the Steem roll in at a faster pace. It would also solve any disagreements about who wrote more posts or comments for their buddies to upvote, since now it doesn't matter since they each get an even cut. If you haven't read them there are comments on the post Help Test Hardfork 21! by 
Even with all this I had decided to tough it out until Steem had another spike in it's price and cash out, hopefully, totally during the up and down movement of the spike. That was my intention until my previous post Human Rights. In the comments of this post I was downvoted by 
Not knowing anything about
Flagging posts was bad enough, but when Steemit changed it to downvoting, this type of abuse was more enabled. From what I have read it seems this type of abuse will only get worse with HF21, way to go Steemit! You guys are on top of it. Is there a contest to see who can come up with the idea to push content creators away from Steemit the fastest? I would suggest, when you come up with the next "idea" to improve Steemit, think through it, develop the concept with some details, then do the exact opposite.
A platform for sharing information without censorship is a great idea. However there has to be some rules put in place to prevent abuse. Steemit strives to be all inclusive letting the crowd reward ideas they like and take away from ideas they don't like. In my opinion, part of the cost of Steemit being all inclusive has been at the expense of civility.
Upon experiencing my abuse I took several days to deliberate my next action. I had already decided that Steemit wasn't worth staying with long term but it would be good to see the price of Steem spike to return some of the money I had invested. At this point I have serious doubts Steem will ever spike again, just continue its slow decline into the abyss of good ideas that were poorly executed. Your running Steemit like a socialist country in which those in power reap the majority of the benefits leaving commoners to fend for themselves. They keep taking and taking until the country is in ruins, look at Venezuela. Socialism has never worked in a country and it will never work as a business model. As for me, comrades, I'm going to seek asylum somewhere else.
