Summary: Steemit is a very expensive blog site to run, and will have to shut down unless we put up spam and advertising on your blogs. You will still have to buy and hold Steem in order to use the site, as before, but now you'll also be paying with your ad impressions and clicks. And we're still going to pretend the site is 'free'. If you don't like it, you can use a different front end to access your funds and blog.

Question: How can you say this to the site's users, who joined up thinking they might get paid for their participation here, as the signup page promises? ('It is free to post, comment, and vote on steemit.com. You might even get paid for it!')

I think the insiders are positioning themselves to profit off the programmers, developers, and content-creators who actually power this community and chain - forever. They're like a big government who gives themselves raises off the taxpayer dime. Claiming they're keeping us all alive and safe, but really just managing and profiteering from us. Or maybe they're more like the big banks, today's moneychangers, doing little but charging much, bogging the entire system down.

Get back to the vision of this site being 100% free for content-creators! No advertising, and no requirement to buy cryptos to get started! How do you think you're going to grow if you make people PAY to get their start here? And the recent censorship issues also point to this project moving FAR away from the one it started as.

This announcement isn't progress, it's just notice that our cost of accessing our blogs and currency just went up. Fallout from the site leadership crumbling last year. I wish I didn't have so much time and money invested here, and I wish I hadn't been begging everybody I knew to join this amazing site for the past 2 years.