An Open Letter to Justin Sun and Steemit

I didn't want it to be this way. I have been here since Steemit effectively was STEEM, but I have shifted my creative output to Hive, and I am finally posting this from Steempeak instead of Steemit.

When I started blogging here, I was drawn to a community of creative and caring individuals who wanted to make something better in this digital frontier. I found people who saw STEEM as more than just another altcoin, and Steemit as something innovative. I know I'm just a little dolphin with crackpot views and weird hobbies, but I am the kind of person you need on board if you care about growth and community as much as you say.

Proof of dedication. Screenshot source

We content creators and manual curators were the ones who brought in new users for conversation. We were the ones striving to make things better by spending our time policing abuse at the grassroots level though the downvotes you proposed eliminating. We attended meetups in person and participated in community projects on this blockchain created by other members. We are what made Steemit something unique. Something special.

Many of us have been around through thick and thin because we believed in the principles we were told Steemit and STEEM represented. You violated those principles almost from the moment you took over, using the worst possible tactics ever since before your purchase of Steemit Inc. went public. You bought your way into power, abused that power, and drove the core of the community away. I had hoped the Hive experiment would show you how serious the community was, and it would be your wake-up call, but you lied about what happened with self-righteous indignation that would make a politician blush. You accuse others of violating the terms of service, but you started this trainwreck when you violated the same terms to seize direct control of the witness seats on the blockchain.

Pictured: Steemit. Image credit

You only seem to see money and power. You had many opportunities to notice how misguided your course of action was. You ignored the community, though, and now the community is preparing to ignore you. You can keep the spammers, plagiarists, and your tokens here. If you don't react wisely, you will lose the community and the value they bring to that stake you hold. You have a choice, Justin & Company. Should you actually read this, you can:

1. Recognize your mistakes and try to reform

2. Ignore me

3. Blacklist me, and in doing so, show the world what you really are: a coward and a bully. At least I will be in the company of good and honorable folk.

Am I wrong, and is there some grain of truth to your rhetoric about "...making it [Steemit] become the best decentralized social network we all envision"? Time is short if you really want to demonstrate it.