I think we're having ups and downs. I haven't been around for a long time either but I see the junk piling up now more than last week for ex. but probably less than next week.

I also think that we're seeing strong trends on content curation, people down-voting bots, nsfw posts that don't have that as the primary tag. Maybe this crowd is now smaller than the one voting for boobs and pot (which I don't have anything against but should be in their own place not on the steemit tag page).

There's also the whales. Some of them try to keep things tight but more need to get involved. If whales downvote posts on some clearly transparent established rules (bots, wrong tag, lottery, etc.) then those people would be discouraged to post more and more.

The community is waking up. Now it's a steemrush, everyone wants money, but I think soon, real content seekers will prevail.