What other delightful way to spend one hour of a lazy, sunny, albeit winterish, Sunday morning, than to write a few bits about your favorite blockchain-based social media network (that would be Steemit, of course)? Well, there aren't many other ways I can think of, to be honest.
Oh, wait, is there any other blockchain-based, fungible-tokens-backed, dollar-pegged-coins-rewarding, delegated-proof-of-stake-managed, really-working social network out there? Ups, I guess not. So it's jackpot baby: Steemit it's both my favorite blockchain-based social network AND the only one. I feel so lucky, damn!
Hardfork 16 Consequences
Everybody and their mothers waited for the big dumpening to happen and for the price of Steem to go below $0.10. For reasons beyond my limited, human comprehension, this didn't happen. At the moment of writing this article, Steem was trading for $0.16 after holding steady between $0.24 and $0.17 for the last two weeks.
That can mean any of the following:
- whales aren't dumping everything, which means the platform is still relevant for them
- Steem is becoming an attractive investment for crypto-speculators, who are considering even the $0.15-0.20 level a good buying point
- somebody from the Steemit ecosystem is holding / hiding significant amounts of Steem in exchanges and throttles the price
The last one is a bit conspiracy-like, but it may be true, who knows?
Another interesting consequence of the hardfork is the lowered inflation. The SP reserves aren't growing as fast as they used to. I personally see this as an incentive to write more, to take action somehow. It's a good thing for the platform because it makes a bit clearer from where the money comes. If money keeps coming from inflation, out of thin air, Steemit is staying dangerously close to the Ponzi scheme club, so that's not good.
The equihash algorithm for mining proved to be an interesting approach and, for a few days, I was able to mine. But then a bug in a third-party library downgraded the algorithm to the old SHA256 (same as BTC). That brought back the infamous mining queue dominated by only a handful of players (allegedly using GPU or ASICS hardware). From what I understand by perusing Github, there is a fix in the workings and that should make equihash available again. Well, it happens.
New Content Types: Sports and NSFW
During the last few weeks, Steemit witnessed the rise of two new content types: sports (mainly bets, as far as I understand) and NSFW (or porn, if you prefer). I'm agnostic to both, so to speak, but I do understand that there is a wide audience for each of them. From that point of view, it's again a sign of growth.
In my opinion, porn will benefit the platform once payments using Steem/SBD can be done easily in other places. Adoption is slow and difficult in any community, so I think it would be much more effective to make payments available in Steem in "traditional" porn hubs, than trying to grow a new NSFW community inside Steemit. That also creates other problems, like clearly separating content based on age, etc.
Maturing apps: SteemConnect and Busy
I had the privilege to be an alpha tester for busy.org and I have to say I'm impressed. They did an amazing job at the user interface level. Also, the rise of SteemConnect is probably the most important thing that happened in the app ecosystem after the Hardfork 16 (and in a long time, if you ask me).
SteemConnect opens the door for third party app makers to integrate Steem into their projects as easy as using OAuth or, I don't know, Sign In With Facebook (if that sounds more familiar to you). The only drawback - which isn't really a drawback, just a feature which hasn't been yet implemented - is that you cannot make transactions using SteemConnect. If / when that will be available, I expect to see I surge in new apps on the Steem blockchain.
Increased Adoption
To my huge surprise, the other day I got a comment from a user called 
For me, this encounter proves that blogging veterans, or at least people with experience in creating and maintaining moderately big sites, are joining Steem. The platform is certainly becoming more and more attractive and the content is becoming more and more mature as well.
So, if I would have to sum it up, I'd say: Steemit is doing rather well, for, you know, a lazy, sunny, albeit winterish Sunday morning.
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 
You can also vote for me as witness here:
https://steemit.com/~witnesses