After all this time, my thoughts are pretty much the same as I shared in my own "IntroduceYourself" post in January 2017:

Just because this place is decentralized and "on the all-sacred blockchain" does not in ANY way exempt a venue like this from having to deal with the sketchier side of human nature.

Steem is something on the order of my 51st or 53rd involvement in some form of "reward users for content" venue, the first being in 1999. The evolution unfolds like clockwork, although often at different speeds, and slightly different outcomes... Enthusiasm, bumpy starts, explosive growth, exploitation, chaos, decay is pretty much the sequence.

The lesson is always the same: As soon as something becomes "worthwhile," the exploiters move in and drain that very same "worthwhile-ness," after which chaos and decay set in... sometimes the decay is rapid, sometimes it is slow.

Squidoo at one point made it as high as the 87th busiest web site on the planet (for reference, that's about like the main BBC or Fox News web sites) but eventually the constant attacks by hackers and bots trying to extract every fraction of a cent via automated scripts drove out tens of thousands of legitimate contributors which set the venue into a slow tailspin till is was acquired in a "rescue mission" my Maven Media (Hubpages) in 2014 and the format changed.

My reason for mentioning that is that not even size is a defense.

When you give people freedom, many will behave badly. And those who "behave badly" will drive out those who don't. In a weird sort of way, it's the psychological equivalent of Gresham's Law — in this case, it's not money we're talking about, but actors: Bad actors drive out good actors.

And that's how we've ended up having this conversation on your post... in a place where engagement has dropped to almost nothing.