It's a Steem takeover

After the long-standing Steem witnesses took the action of a soft fork to enforce Ned's promise to not use the @steemit stake to take over the platform we have the retaliation. Steemit/Tron have used their influence with several exchanges to power up the Steem they hold and vote in some puppet witnesses. These are running new software that unleashed the Steemit SP to make them unassailable.

There's no real chance of Steem users getting the true witnesses back into the top 20. There's a statement on @steemitblog saying this was to combat 'malicious' actions, but it makes Steem a centralised platform.

They are still making noises about improving Steem, but this rings a bit hollow. There is mention of cutting the power down time to a couple of days.

Already several of the old witnesses have pulled out and some are shutting down dapps in protest.

The Steem price is currently slowly dropping, so even if we do power down it may not be worth much.

This all makes me very sad. I've been relentlessly upbeat about Steem for over 3 years and five a lot to promote it. No doubt lots of people will now say 'told you so'.

Steemit say they will be 'using voting rights to resume the order of the community' in a few weeks. Not sure what that really means. Will there still be a community by then?

My Steem is currently worth a few thousand dollars, which is more than I have spent on it, but then I have spent thousands of hours engaging with the platform. Others spent a lot more of their money and are likely to be very concerned about their investment.

I am feeling a bit down right now. It is not about the money for me. I care about the community and what the platform could do for many others. I will be monitoring the situation for a while before I take any action.

Peace.