In my opinion unless ad revenues can start to be shared among active content creators then a continual downward pressure on the STEEM exchange rate will be felt by the users you speak of selling off and deflating STEEM until they walk away when it is in the dumps. Pethaps we are at that point.

This has been my experience with the @devcoin project after introducing a wiki that paid for content contributions.

Our focus should be to bring value into the project and to plug the bleeding. HF21 seems to have made some efforts in that regard.