It's very easy to miss the small changes when you're fully immersed in the process.
It's like when you're starting a journey in the fields and, as you walk, you start noticing some rocks and they become a bit larger and then even larger and then, suddenly, you find yourself trekking on a beautiful mountain trail. It wasn't like that in the beginning, when you started on flat land, but it didn't transform into a mountain all of a sudden: it was a gradual process.
We're experiencing the same pattern in Steemit: some small, gradual changes evolved during last year and became the norm that we're experiencing today.
I find 3 of these "invisible" changes worthy of attention.
1. Advertisers Bidding For Attention
It may not be the initial model the founders envisioned, but it's a model and it's working: bidding bots are a reality in Steemit and they are moving around money. And they are moving it in at least 2 ways:
- First, they are actively promoting content, which gets more upvotes, more visibility and, probably, more curation rewards if they are picked by "professional" curators or curators guilds.
- Second, they are actively promoting themselves, as services, by using the memo field of the transactions. Which leads me directly to the next change:
2. Paid Messaging
Sending very small amounts of STEEM to put some info into a memo (usually advertising something) looks trivial now in Steemit. But it wasn't like that in the beginning. I still remember when 
custom_json field. So, for most of the Steemians, sending and receiving messages is a paid process now. It's a very important perception shift, and many of us are taking it for granted.
3. API Changes
And then, there's the API changes. Under the hood, Steem, as a blockchain, evolved massively, although end users may not notice that. We evolved from a curl / websocket world to a https / web land. I won't argue about the benefits of one over the other, I will just say the later makes development easier, by allowing an entire new category of developers to join in.
All these 3 changes were so slow, that we didn't even notice them. But all of them are extremely important from a business point of view.
First, they reflect an evolving, living organism. Look at the other crypto projects and in 95% of cases you'll see stalled, or "secret development" projects, where updates are scarce (if any) and the overopitmistic goals announced in the ICO are still in the fantasy land.
Second, a strong use case for the internal currency is created: money is moved around to bid for the user's attention. That was Steemit's goal from day one. It may NOT be in the form Steemit founders hoped it will be, but hey, users (like markets) are always right. If that's what they found worthy of promotion, then bidding bots are the thing.
And third, allowing more developers to come onboard, and write libraries, SDKs or entire projects on top of the blockchain, is an exceptional move. We live in a world where there are more tokens than apps, where end users are lazy and where real projects are scarcer than water on the surface of Moon.
Yes, we still have some problems floating around.
Among them, the "flag wars" and the scalability of the blockchain are the more concerning for me, but let's focus on the bright side for once, shall we?
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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