Maybe the upcoming fork will help with the broken distribution and lack of personal engagement, maybe it won’t. Maybe that’s what it’s intended to do, maybe it’s not.
I have also been here for nearly two years. I noted a few changes which co-incidentally occurred at more or less the same time that I became aware of changes in the way way and amount of interaction. By the way, I have written of the flagging issue quite a few times and it is always those with high Rep who reply, squelching me, telling me I am wrong and do not know of what I am talking about.
Do they provide reasons any practical person with experience in running businesses would find justify them? No. Do they sprout reasons that a psychologist who has studied society would confirm as being valid? No.
They just give gobbledygook made to sound like good socialist propaganda (sounding like Bernie and AOC).
I will not re-hash those arguments. It is something else that has played a large role in destroying steemit for me.
I am not much for debating using analysis, preferring to use examples, so please bear with me.
Tom posts an article. Various people respond. One of them, Dick, sends a vitriolic comment attacking and insulting him. Tom being a nice guy does not know how to respond and remains quiet. However, as the days go by he starts to grow bitter. He had hoped his steemit 'friends' would take a stand and defend him, but he sees nothing.
Tom finally withdraws from Steemit and two years later he visits. He returns to examine that comment to check on whether it truly was as upsetting as he had thought it was. Well, it was - but he suffers a shock.
He sees that Harry wrote a strongly worded reply to Dick, analysing and proving how and why Dick was wrong. He posted his comment as a reply to Dick, so it did not show up on the Reply page of Tom and nor did it show up when he opened up the comment by Dick. To see it, he had to go all the way back and click to see the full content of the post and comments - not something most people do....
He sees that a number of others also responded to Harry, agreeing with him.
Tom feels devastated. He abandoned his friends because of the Steemit hobnobs changing the system so that we no longer automatically see conversations (sort of integral to succeeding in creating a feeling of community, isn't it? Plus, it seems this coders who make the decisions, do not know what the word 'conversation' means. It does not mean that you should only see the reply to you, it means you should also be (automatically) able to see and be a part of the conversations which were generated from the two original article and comment.
So, HF21 now tries to address the problem they caused with the previous HF and make matters worse, and Steemit grows even less friendly.
After all, they have already discussed the possibility of altering the new author/curator percentage in the next HF, so that the curators get 80% of the upvotes earned. Their argument is that only curators matter, without them Steemit would no longer exist. Really? I had thought us authors are important, for if there is nothing good to curate, for how long would any decent person curate? Add to that fact that curation should be by authors...not from people who are not part of the community, but have large SP and are coders/witnesses.
Thank you for reading my post and sharing your experiences. It’s funny that your story of Mr. Tom, Dick and Harry perfectly describes what happened to me. So perfect in fact that I’m sitting here a bit stunned, and since I’m one who thinks coincidences are an important communication from a higher place, I’ll be considering what your choice to share that example is really meant to make me realize. I very much appreciated your being a part of this important communication from higher realms. What did Tom choose to do when he realized that his friends cared and were there for him?
I can only tell you what I did, though I did not leave, I just stopped communicating. I looked and found that most of those friends had migrated to other related platforms. I signed up there and tried to support their posts.
I came to steemit without plans for making money or even, for making friends. That stuff just slowly happened. I came here because I had written a novel of about 20,000 pages and did not want to die, someone gets my computer and formats the hard drives, killing off a bunch of people I have grown to love. I had just read about the blockchain providing an extended life to whatever is posted there, so it seemed a good idea to upload it using steemit. Since then I have realised that archive. com is a better place, for it may exist longer in the blockchain, but it also gets hidden, since it is not easy to read old posts. Steemit is not created to provide even that temporary kind of extended life.
What is also important now is that I am still meeting some very nice people. I know, internet friends (says my cynical half)...and my answer is, so what. If they live more than a 100 km from my home, I am not likely to meet them, so I might as well accept them at face value. As you say, maybe something is being planned for me that I would never have dared plan for? Perhaps what I do here is being echoed across to other realities and something happens there?
In the last 10 days, my closest friend here decided to stop and withdrew...but, I have also met someone I knew of, who once we began to comment, found we have much in common and I think he is growing to be a friend. Since I aalso admire his talent, I hope so.
So, who knows what Tom would do? Perhaps what matters more is, what will you do? Do you need for others to give to you, or, is the need for you to give, greater?
PS: If 'they who run steemit' really wanted to encourage communication between steemians, why haven't they removed that stupid rule about comments that earn anything less than 2c not getting their money? Even with SP of a 1,000 means that at 100% your upvote is still only worth about 0.013, so we cannot encourage others to reply by 'bribing' them or by 'encouraging' them by showing we appreciate their comment. If someone gives me a 1c upvote and I add mine so as not to waste that 1c, I am then accused of being a heavy self-voter...
Wow I didn’t know about that. Outrageous.
No that's not how it works. Its the curation window that changed after the hard fork, which means if you up vote someones comment to soon, the curation goes to the reward pool. But this coming hard fork they changed that window to one min to fix this problem.