I wasn't meaning to invalidate your experience. I know that a lot of whales haven't invested a dime into the platform and got to this point through sheer perseverance and hard work.

I feel that the difficulties for today's minnows are much more significant than those experienced by users a year ago. The bandwidth issues are extreme (sometimes I have 40kb to work with) and sometimes you'll earn a single penny on content that took two hours to write.

In no way do i blame the whales/dolphins for these issues. I've seen a lot of community support from large and small users alike. But the platform has some serious usability issues that need to be addressed if it's going to see growth as a mainstream social media platform.

I appreciate your detailled reply and of course the upvote.