This is pretty much the same thing with me. I'd like to see Steem bounce back, but I stopped trying to act professional, stopped having faith this place was a good place for building, curating and growing on. Started saying 'fuck' a lot more, because I finally had enough.

Justin wasn't the beginning for me though. I hated HF 21 and the #NewSteem movement. I found it anti-business and counterproductive with a bunch of reward pool nazis going around bitching at people and flagging them. Honestly, I really dislike a fair amount of people here, they're kind of assholes...

I found Justin's vision of turning STEEM into a TRC-20 very disconcerting, but also knew that if they did SMTs right even that would not be a huge problem and might mean SMT communities bridged to Dlive.

The governance war was the final straw. Steem, Hive, both fucked. This shit is now such a mess the competition out there for decentralized social platforms will definitely win against Steem or anything resembling it. Hive doesn't have years of brand recognition, web ranking and it will take a long time for them to achieve that stuff. By then some platform like Bluesky or Pepo will have taken market share.

I can really only see one way out of this mess for Steem. And that is Asia. Perhaps the east side of the world did not get the attention they deserved and the English speaking world dominated this platform and are now moving to Hive. Other crypto-centric platforms indicate eastern population demand, such as Minds.com's astounding 40%+ audience coming from India. USA is only like 15% of Steemit.com's traffic, while South Korea makes up another 15%. If China and India can be motivated to use Steem, fuck the English speakers (like myself) because that's how to get billions of people.