Many things have changed in just the past few months. The hardfork reward restructuring really mixed things up, partly for the good and partly for the bad.

I must say that incentivizing more curation can be good but not at the expense of small authors. They should have done it so the little guys get more of their reward and the bigger posts are the ones where curation is given more weight.

One day Steem will be back in the spotlight, until then we have to keep chugging along and building those small connections in between. Don't forget how important it is to go out and actually network with people by dropping comments, curating and sharing content. Without this we are all just shouting into the void.