As an initiative from 
(I was planning on keeping this short and simple, but it kind of snowballed and now there's a huge post.)
I am a photographer, and I've been using Steem/Hive soon for 4 years. I've been slowly growing an audience, and trying to build a steady source of income by posting every day.
I've almost made it for a few times, but there have been quite a few setbacks almost every time I've "made it big" and I've thought I can finally let out a sigh of relief. But I think it will never be so.
I had been on the blockchain since September 2016, having posted only occasionally, trying this and that, never really getting very much interaction, or recognition. There was no profits to be made either. But I still thought the idea was cool, and I stayed.
My first ever #onephotoeveryday photo was a smartphone photo taken off of the computer screen.
In June 26 2017 when I had gathered 365 followers on Steem, I kicked off a photo project #onephotoeveryday, that was to challenge me to shoot one photo every day.
The project started with a bang getting $9 for the first post, and to my surprise I started getting quite many views in very short time. I was amazed really. Still am, my posts are generally making similar returns now, compared to what they did then. And I'm still struggling to get over the magical €10 line. Somehow it's weird seeing people get €20, €50, even €100 per post, but it hasn't put me down. (Well yea I think it's a kind of a lie, because it kind of did in the beginning, when the rewards were more like constant 0.00/post.)
But the thing that I loved was the community. People would be really active and come to my posts and discuss with me about the photos. The comment sections were truly lively, almost always at least 15 comments, normally over 30, and on best days reaching to 50-100 comments per post. It was amazing!
I've always upvoted comments on my posts. I think that's only fair.
The #onephotoeveryday project eventually got so big, that many people started doing their own challenges under the same tag. I am very grateful for everyone who joined and spread the project along!
Some setbacks...
The first ever setback though came in the form of a whale who had self-appointed himself to the role of crime fighter. His idea of a crime was simply having wrong opinions, and boy did he use his army of bots to take away all the potential profits, and reputation of a friend of mine, who was a shitposter and a loudmouth, but still a good guy.
I decided to stand up and help his victim out, and I set 100% upvotes on his every post. (I only had some 20000SP at the time.) But it worked, to an extent, and he was slowly getting lifted up from his reputation of -13. At the point where he was about to break out from the negatives, the whale made a threat against me, telling me that he would take my profits. I stood my ground and told him in no unclear terms that what he was doing (threats) was wrong, and might even be illegal.
After a few initial downvotes, he backed off, and let me do my thing. I was no threat to him, nor was I an idiot who'd start a flame war and purposely provoke him.
Then there was the 2018 crash. In January still I was making a good amount of money, and I was thinking that I might even be able to provide for my family from the rewards. It came to an end, and my investment went from 200k to 20k to measly 3k. And my potential profits from the occasional 25€ per post to way below 50¢ per post.
I was not equipped to deal with that. So after the crash, and getting my on going photo project #onephotoeveryday to finish, I tried dabbling with streaming and some other odd posts. But then I got really tired and depressed, and left altogether for half a year.
When I got back, I still didn't know what to do. The rewards weren't great, and well almost all of my subscribers were missing so even the comment section felt empty.
There was also a time I got attacked by some Steem orcas who thought I was wrong about something, and they'd downvote my posts to oblivion, but got eventually got tired of it. I never thought much of them.
I kept making sporadic updates on our life, travels, pets and going to the gym. But something was still missing.
Only after the Steemfest4 in Thailand, that I took part with my son Leo did I feel I was starting to get enough willpower and stamina to kick off a new one year long project, the "Daily and Fresh".
It started out almost exactly the same as the previous project. Well not really. There were much less readers. People had left Steem. I don't know whether it's because whales and orcas like the ones I bumped into and all the wars they had had scared people off. It might be.
It could have been the #newsteem that while being generally a good thing, fighting off bidbots with huge downvotes and a fork of Steem giving everyone 3 free downvotes led to a few negative outcomes.
Bidbots as we all know leeched off greedy people's money while simultaneously draining the reward pool so that legitimite votes would end up being worth nothing.
I guess it was because of OCD, that started off as a bidbot (circlejerk as some might want to call it, and yes it was a bid bot don't get me wrong) joining the anti-bidbot fight and changing into a legitimite curation service, that some of the disgruntled bidbot owners took offence.
Mariusz
In the end of last year, there appeared a new self-appointed warrior of justice, white knight who had been a bidbot owner, profited off of his scheme, and become disgruntled having lost his lucrative business model. At first he fought the windmills, then settled on a community service called SBI, the Steem Basic Income project.
He used his huge stake of Steem and downvoted everyone who received votes from SBI to oblivion.
His idea was that since bid-bots were bad, all and everything that might even distantly remind a vote bidding service would be the same. Because he can't profit off of selling huge reward pool draining votes, nobody can profit off from generating even the tiniest votes for a payment.
If anything and this is what he doesn't seem to understand is, SBI is democratising the distribution of votes, and since the votes are generally quite small, they have a slight chance in hell of depleting the reward pool. Also, when the votes are distributed more evenly there is less chance of someone getting a jackpot, a huge reward for almost no effort, like it was in the early days of Steem.
If he ever were to succeed and kill off SBI, would his era of downvote terror end? Likely not, he would find new targets to hold the community a ransom for. I think his next target would be peakd.com for allowing the use of SBI, and for selling a post promotion service, or maybe he will go after 
I am currently running a counter campaign spreading more SBI love than he can downvote.
Yeah, well I guess he scared quite a many people out of Steem before the ultimate devastation hit the blockchain.
Justin Sun
- Justin (
) had bought Steemit Inc. from @Ned for an undisclosed sum, with access to the Steemit ninja-mined stake that was originally to be used for Steem development, onboarding new users and rewarding useful Steem projects.
- He then decided to make comments that he'd migrate Steem to the Tron blockchain. Everyone knew this would be technically impossible without doing away with the whole blockchain. Steem was not merely a cryptocurrency, and creating a Steem token and destroying the chain would mean end for the whole community, and their investments.
- The ninja-mined stake was temporarily frozen by the Steem witnesses, which he was initially okay with, but on the very next few days he started calling a theft.
- He somehow managed to convince four exchanges (including his own) to power up, and delegate witness voting power for his
sock puppet account, which he used to vote 20 other sockpuppet witness accounts to the top 20 witness spots.
- Stalemate ensued for a while, where we would vote legitimate witnesses in, and he would vote them out, simultaneously begging the Steem witnesses to create a hardfork that would enable instant powerdowns (to let him off the hook for hijacking his and 3 other exchanges' customers' funds for minimum of 13 weeks, to take over our blockchain).
- Justin begged and bought some support from the Korean Steem community and some dapps, so he was gaining the upper hand. While the witnesses were trying to slow his efforts to take the chain over...
- HIVE was created. Justin and his cohorts were exluded from getting any tokens.
In the end, we have an almost clean slate now. And that's a great thing.
But...
The people who originally chased and harassed people off the blockchain, the ones I already discussed about, are still here, actively harassing people away from the blockchain.
There was also some religious spam before, but I guess it has stopped soon after we moved on to Hive.
So
The thing that I would like Hive to become in the future, is more inviting to newcomers, less demanding, as in effort, and also more forgiving.
There seem to be powerful people around who think that they have the ultimate say on everything that goes on in the chain. That they can act like they have no ramifications for their own actions. These people are what made Steem, and maybe even Hive, a less welcoming community.
I've seen people being forced to write apologies for things they haven't even done to get their accounts off some downvote lists. That's curious. Who creates these lists, and for what purpose? To make an example?
I don't think that's the way to market this chain to investors, or newcomers, or anyone.
There are dark forces at play even today. So don't think for a second that the successful conclusion of the fight with Justin was the end of it all.
On one thing I am certain of.
While there may be downvote squads and generally awful people around here, they can't really affect on my ability to create content, and to communicate with the community I have following me. They can not cut off me from my community. I will always have a voice, and can not be silenced. No matter how much they would want, or how hard they will try.
That's the ultimate power of Hive.
I thank you. It is now very late and I will be sleeping till noon I guess.
See ya later!
