The turning point was the whale expirement. @Smooth and @abit started counteracting whale up votes with downvotes. This changed the platform from one where a few authors got all the rewards to a Dynamic one with changing reward and more active users. After the whales stopped voting the robots stopp d working. All they really did was front run predictable whale voting list. Without whales votes robot returns went down. With reward more distributed user activity increased. The altcoin ramp started about the same time. With activity up post whale experiment people stopped power downs and steem rose making people more excited again.