I still remember that hype about crypto in 2017. I've seen steem to be priced 8 bucks which seems so crazy now and everybody, well almost everybody was convinced it will turn 100 bucks in the near future and replace reddit, facebook and any other social media platform. Steem was being flooded with great quality content, genuine engagement very interesting people to engage with even thought at that time there were almost no dapps build on the blockchain apart steem.blog.
And to tbh it had it all to be there until it was corrupted bu human greed. Even in Steem whitepaper it says it is an experiment, and as any experiment it might always have two possible outcomes. And it is a bit sad to see that it turned into the less desirable one, at least for now. At first it began it's downward journey with autovoting which was dealt with through multiple forks, that it continued with curation trails. Quality content creators began leaving the platform, genuine engagement diminished to comments of few simple words if any and big numbers of autovotes for curation rewards.
I am still convinced that splitting curation and author rewards to 50-50 was a mistake but those types of things are decided by the majority and i am in minority it seems. And that is probably ok, i do not have such a deep knowledge of blockchain as witnesses have and might be they have a longer time frame perspective on things, i can judge only as a user and content creator.
I have even started a photography community that would reward photographers in steem for their quality images, onboarded quite a number of people onto the platform i.e. to steem as well. Sadly with the diminishing price of steem it also came to a halt little by little.
All that being said, it became a habit to come and share a post, a photo or to engage with few old school blockchain users in a few short words, but the overall experience is far from what it used to be, i can say that for sure.
I have earned quite a bit of crypto on my posts, so thank you for your votes even though my posts get voted automatically. I see some great initiatives like @Qurator 
I might sound like a broken record, but i will repeat myself again. There will never be quality content created until there are convenient ways to search and discover that content. And for today it seems it would be the best way to engage with the platform by setting up a bot that would post content for me on a regular basis and auto vote on posts of selected users. And maybe it's what the future will look like: content generated by AI and consumed by AI and maybe that's where the future economy lies.
As for me, i'm an old school guy that used to love real engagement, discussions and differences in opinion, shared knowledge and discovering new things by interaction.
Bottom line is, that even though i have earned quite a stake through my content creation my biggest achievement is my rating of 70 that I've just achieved since monetary reward in today's valuation in not an incentive to me. full disclosure, i power down occasionally and trade my Hive on exchanges since in that way i can earn much more influence, than from my curation rewards. It is a protest in a way i guess to what this new paradigm turned into: money making machine based on how fat your wallet is.
I will continue to accumulate my stake through the means i find most effective in hopes that one day Hive will become what we wanted it to be. That we find a way and a key to a meaningful and rewarding online social engagement and i will be able to experience that thrill i used to have on Steem in 2017.
I am almost sure no one will read this text wall because time is so scarce and attention spans are so short, but it will remain here on blockchain as a testimony for myself and maybe some day i will read it again and be happy that things changed and turned out the way it was meant to be.
Thank you to all people that i was fortunate to meet here and have interesting discussions and share our experiences. However it turns out, we were the pioneers that were discovering new ways and new possibilities, however it ends. Have a great day everybody!
David