I remember the times when top trending posts earned $25.000, few users powered down and the price of steem was revolving round $2. I remember the names of 
Has much changed? Definitely.
I can say that right now Steemit is having a Renaissance period when the most popular tags are art, poetry, photography and writing. Hobbies bring people money, good artworks are appreciated and authours participate in steemit contests - and that is really cool. Still it has not always been so.
Being a passionate photographer and an amateur writer I remember publishing my first poem and a novel here of steemit which didn't really bring me any success. Now I see the reason: the audience was different and demanded some other type of content.
In the very beginning the hot talks on the subject of economy and cryptocurrencies were the top ones. The influx of new users resulted in introducemyself skyrocketing (July 2016) which mixed with tutorials and travel posts. That was the Golden Age for the system (at least for me) when the trending stories earned many hundreds and even thousand dollars. More and more posts about steem and steemit were published and users began to overdo with the steemit tag just to promote their posts.
The shift in interest from one category to some other is by no means accidental: it represents the interests of the users and their demography. So, the original population of steemit was mostly represented by investors, male users who knew what the words bitcoin, market cap and currency exchange rate mean and who learned about the platform from some professional forum. They were few, and those who entered the system later extruded the cryptolovers - the native tribes living on steemit's blue plains.
The newcomers were people with some very basic knowledge of economy and crypto - and therefore not really interested in pumps and investing. So the interests changed and the system had to adjust to the new users and their demands. All that happened in just a couple of weeks, users tried to be as original as possible writing about timing, whales, submitting tutorials and drawing memes.
Art entered the scene after one of the users drew 
Still I believe that some new shift will happen quite soon and I wonder what it would be.
Even though the number of steemit users is constantly growing, there seems to be a decline in activity. Fewer comments are left while the number of empty accounts is going up. Those who don't hope to get paid for their content try to earn some money upvoting and powering down. Such people don't even read the posts; everything they pay attention to is the user's rating, current payout and sometimes the topic. As simple as that.
Even though the system is not experiencing its best time right now (IMHO), I do believe that the guys have done a great job trying to cope bots, fake accounts and plagiarism. Steemit is an innovation, a founding father for the emerging steem-based systems like the Russian Golos and the Chinese Decent.
This article may be printed on some page in a history studentbook in the 22nd century. Who knows. Steemit is the future and we're those who're chosen to see its evolution.
Anastasia
